Before you ask: no, I’m not praying for the end of time.

Paragon of studliness that he undoubtedly is, the Instant Man had no trouble at all pointing to this possibly-dubious set of assertions:

Middle-aged men are being chased so much by single women that they are becoming deluded about their sex appeal.

A drought of mid-40s single men, compared with single women of the same age, means they are fiercely pursued, inflating their opinion of their attractiveness.

KPMG demographer Bernard Salt, author of The Big Tilt: What Happens When Boomers Bust and Xers and Ys Inherit the Earth, says the imbalance has created a monster he dubs the “hotness delusion syndrome”.

At fifty-seven, I’m a bit too old for this phenomenon, and I’m assuming the demographics were different when I was in my middle forties; certainly nothing like that ever happened to me back then. Moreover, I think I can safely say that I have never overestimated my own sex appeal, and I’m pretty sure the readership can back me up on that.

This being a piece from an Australian newspaper, I have to wonder: is this something that only happens down under? KPMG, of course, operates worldwide, but I don’t get the impression that Salt is coming up with this stuff at the behest of KPMG. Then again, Salt once proclaimed, presumably tongue-in-cheek, that the Australian regions with the best economic performance were those in which motion pictures starring Sigrid Thornton were made.

For reference, Sigrid Thornton is now 52, and looks something like this:

Probably too late to lure her to Detroit, though.

Volkswagen wants you to Think Blue, which, it turns out, is their “green” initiative. If this makes no sense to you, Nancy Friedman will explain:

[W]hy “blue” and not “green,” the color more commonly associated with “sustainable ecological action”?

For starters, “blue” directly references BlueMotion, the umbrella name (in Europe, anyway) for “the most fuel-efficient Volkswagen model in its class.” (That doesn’t necessarily mean hybrids or plug-in electrics; the Polo Blue Motion has a diesel engine.) Origin, the UK branding agency that came up with BlueMotion, explained the name thus: “Blue” is the Volkswagen colour and represents elements such as air and water whilst “Motion” embodies future, forward-looking mobility.

Perhaps much to Vee Dub’s annoyance, they don’t have the blue bandwagon all to themselves: Mercedes-Benz hawks BlueTEC Diesel vehicles here — on a page that says “THINKING GREEN,” yet! And if having to keep up with the Benzes is a blow to one’s (or Ferdinand Piëch’s, anyway) self-esteem, think what it must be like to take a back seat to Hyundai:

Hyundai introduces Blue Drive, an emblem that will start appearing on Hyundai models beginning with the ’09 Elantra and Accent. It represents Hyundai’s comprehensive overhaul of thinking green. With Blue Drive products and technologies, Hyundai will be able to achieve a fleet average of 35 miles per gallon by 2015, a full five years ahead of government guidelines.

Neither Elantra nor Accent utilizes any expensive gee-whiz technotrickery, either; they’re simply a bit more miserly with fuel than their class competitors.

Then again, Friedman was noticing this sort of thing a couple of years ago herself:

During her presentation at the American Name Society’s annual meeting in January [2009], Catchword principal Laurel Sutton predicted a rise in “blue” in names for environmentally conscious brands. (After all, healthy oceans, lakes, rivers, and skies are pretty important for a sustainable future.)

Anyone want to guess the eventual replacement for “blue”?

Update: Tweaked the Mercedes line slightly.

As most of you know, I am highly susceptible to earworms, and I am not above putting them here to share the misery.

The example at hand (no visuals, so I decided not to embed the “video”) I first heard last spring in an episode of Coverville; I can usually count on at least one song per episode pushing my WTF button, but this one positively slammed it. The track comes from Canadian wisenheimers The Pursuit of Happiness; it may not be the most off-center Prince cover ever, but it’s definitely the one I play most loudly.

This statement from Little Miss Attila puzzled me a bit:

Everyone lies about Twitter-flirting, and everyone knows that everyone lies about Twitter-flirting.

In fact, I denied it: “I don’t do any Twitter-flirting, simply because, well, what’s the point?”

Which, we are supposed to assume, is a lie, and everyone knows it.

Then again, there’s this, from Vent #197:

Seldom if ever am I the flirtee, let alone the flirter — either that, or I’m too stupid to know when someone is coming on to me.

It occurs to me, eleven years later, that I probably should have included “C. All of the above.”

We’re now into June, and I noticed that I’d made 177 posts in May, which sounds — well, pretty much like any May, actually. Inasmuch as the counts are (mostly) readily at hand, I went back several Mays, and came up with the following:

2010:  172.
2009:  178.
2008:  168.
2007:  169.
2006:  176.
2005:  168.
2004:  143.
2003:  145.
2002:  42.
2001:  31.

The switch to a daily (or more often) update schedule began in the summer of 2000. The jump in 2003 is explained by the fact that in August 2002, I first installed backend software to do the heavy lifting around here: before that, everything was hand-coded and tedious. (After that, it was simply tedious.)

The California Assembly thinks it’s found a new revenue stream:

The state of California could collect more than $1 billion a year by taxing Amazon and other online retailers if a bill approved by the Assembly becomes law.

Assemblyman Charles Calderon, a Democrat from Whittier, says his legislation doesn’t impose a new sales tax, but extends one that California should already have been enforcing.

According to Bill Quick, the take is being overestimated by more than $1 billion a year:

If this becomes law, it will net California exactly zero. As I have repeated elsewhere, California has no power to force an out of state company to collect sales taxes for it. No state does. These morons are hanging their hats on the notion that because Amazon pays a commission to web publishers who carry their ads, they then somehow have a “presence” in the state that permits California to force them to collect.

Even this is a murky notion — but Amazon has traditionally dealt with assaults like this by simply ceasing to pay commissions to web publishers who are residents of the state in question.

Such as, for instance, Bill Quick.

Mr Calderon should probably stick to topics he comprehends, such as looking at state officials with lust in his heart.

So I get an email from the guy who’s doing promotion for this treehouse (yes!) community in Costa Rica, and the first thing I do is look around for the “Yeah, right” key.

But then I hit the proffered link, and this came up:

[Finca Bellavista from Matt Rath on Vimeo.]

And in something less than the three and a half minutes of this video, I’d already decided that this qualified as Entirely Too Cool.

Mr Rath, it appears, is hoping to put together enough fundage for a full-fledged documentary on Finca Bellavista. At the very least, I can point you in his direction.

Oh, and there’s this, from the FAQ:

Even though it is a very dynamic environment, the rainforest is no more dangerous than living elsewhere. We do get a lot of rain during certain times of year (though we are outside of the hurricane belt!) and there can be earthquakes in the Southern Zone. (Treehomes are often engineered and constructed to move with the winds and with earthquakes so while a conventional structure’s foundation might be damaged after an earthquake, a treehome’s foundation (a.k.a. its root system) has evolved during its entire lifespan to absorb the vibrations far better than a slab of concrete). Isn’t it dangerous to live in Oklahoma where there are tornados, or in Florida where there are floods and hurricanes, or Australia where there are fires or … you get the point?

Point gotten.

Automakers have submitted their May sales reports, and once again, the worst-selling marque among those reporting is Daimler AG’s Maybach brand, which moved a total of four cars during those 31 days. Of course, at four hundred large per, that’s a fair chunk of change, at least to peasants at my level, but still: four. Presumed arch-rival Rolls-Royce, owned by actual Daimler arch-rival BMW, managed to sell 44. Then again, there hasn’t been a Roller dealer here since the Eighties oil bust, though Mercedes-Benz of Oklahoma City is high enough on the totem pole to rate as a Maybach “studio,” in case one of the local NBA types doesn’t want to be seen in Kevin Durant’s conversion van.

(Actually, the only Thunder player I think I’ve seen on the road is James Harden, in a Bentley with the window tint cranked up to “You’ll need the Hubble telescope.” Even then, the beard is to be feared.)

And apparently 1759 of the little Fiat Cinquecentos were loosed upon the American public in May, though I have yet to see one around town.

Dave Schuler says we’re starving for experiences beyond our own little orbits:

The interest in artificial experiences of all sorts whether reality shows or video games suggests to me that there’s a real hunger out there. I, personally, have no interest in being a car thief, a rock star, or a professional athlete but, clearly, there are lot of people who do. My tastes run more to being a wandering rascal who lives by his wits and saves kingdoms from wicked sorcerers and beautiful maidens from dragons. Heck, I am a wandering rascal who lives by his wits. The surroundings may not be quite as romantic but I have saved some companies from going belly-up and kept a few reasonably attractive young people from losing their jobs.

We’re still up to our [name of pertinent body part, plural form] in wicked sorcerers, though, so clearly there is much to be done.

And I’m not so sure about this:

Recording crowded out first musicians, then actors. Movies, radio, and television crowded out live performers of all sorts. Today you can watch and listen to the greatest actors, singers, instrumentalists, and performers of the last century but the opportunities to act, sing, play an instrument, or juggle are growing ever more limited.

The current items in my Fiction to Read queue: An Object of Beauty by Steve Martin, and John Donnelly’s Gold by Brian J. Noggle. Martin, at this writing, is somewhat better-known, though there are no guarantees in life, as some of the greatest performers of the last century could tell you were they so inclined and/or still alive.

And “opportunities limited”? What, did YouTube suddenly suspend operations?

This time around — it’s the 424th — Andrew Ian Dodge is “Greying” the Carnival of the Vanities.

I’d point out that if I did anything 424 times, I’d be grey too, but that would be obvious, so instead I’ll direct you to the proper use of MIT’s Graphic Identity Colors, which are red and gray, and the specific gray is Pantone 424.

We’ve all seen these little cards with the Dire Warning:

Now my first reaction was the perfectly understandable “My car is eleven years old, dumbass, of course the warranty has expired.”

And then I looked again at the card, and sure enough, that’s the Impact font across the top, as seen on eleventy-bazillion lolcat pictures.

So it was a simple matter to bring it up to my own exacting standards:

Read the rest of this entry »

Things may get better, but it’s entirely possible that they’ll get worse first, in which case Roberta X was right all along:

Water runs downhill and the two big parties sweat over diverting it a few degrees to the left or right, both hotly denying it’ll ever reach bottom. They’re dreaming but the nightmare will be ours. No Congressman will miss a meal, no bureaucrat, nobody in the Executive or Judicial branches is gonna have to choose between the gas bill and the electric bill. I strongly suspect for the rest of us, if that’s as bad as it ever gets, that’ll be a good outcome.

Way back in Vent #63, in the summer of ’97, I opined about those same parties and how they managed to get control of the dialogue:

[F]arther down in the subtext is the notion that those two particular parties somehow manage to subsume the whole of American political belief; you got your Democrats, you got your Republicans, and what’s left isn’t worth a bucket of John Nance Garner’s bodily fluids.

Garner famously described the Vice Presidency as “not worth a bucket of warm spit,” only he didn’t say “spit.”

Not all of us on OG&E’s Smart Grid are on time-of-day pricing, so I didn’t notice the official declaration that there are 25 peak hours per week: Monday through Friday, 2-7 pm. I did guess that peak usage might cost three times as much as off-peak usage, and apparently I was wrong:

Looks like this week off peak prices are $0.05 per kWh and peak pricing is $0.25 per kWh. Typical average price outside of this was around $0.08…so watch your usage so you don’t get a shock on your bill.

The standard-price tariff, at the moment — this is the Summer Price Period — is $0.084/kWh for the first 1400 kWh, $0.0968 thereafter, plus a flat $13. I pay a little more than this because I’m subscribed to the wind program; I hit 1400 kWh only once last year. According to the published neighborhood statistics, my own consumption is about 10-15 percent below average. I have no idea how much effect time-of-day pricing would have on me; I’m at work for at least half that period every day. Then again, if I don’t crank up the A/C until I get home, it’s going to run until midnight.

The variable-price tariff, incidentally, allows for a higher tier during critical (read: “we’re damn near maxed out”) periods, which may approach $0.50/kWh for those presumably-limited times.

This time, Rebecca Black doesn’t have to ask which seat she should take. (Thanks to BOP/Tiger Beat.)

And if you’re thinking tomorrow is Centaxday, and Taungsday comes afterwards, this is for you:

(When I start numbering these, there’s a problem.)

And Chrysler and Jeep, too:

The Treasury Department said on Thursday it reached an agreement to sell its remaining 6 percent equity stake in Chrysler to Italy’s Fiat in a deal that will net Washington $560 million.

The proceeds of the deal include the sale of the government’s interest in a UAW retiree trust, Treasury said in a mid-evening statement.

Fiat agreed to pay Treasury $500 million for Treasury’s 98,461 shares of Chrysler. Treasury also had an option to buy shares held by the UAW retiree trust and Fiat agreed to buy that for $75 million — with Treasury to get $60 million and the government of Canada $15 million.

This gives Fiat what they wanted most: majority control of Chrysler Group. The 6 percent being retrieved from Treasury will push Fiat’s interest to 52 percent.

The government — and, by extension, taxpayers — took a short bath, or maybe a shower, on this deal:

The Obama administration invested $12.5 billion in Chrysler under the Troubled Asset Relief Program during the 2007-2009 financial crisis and said that, after the transaction, Chrysler will have returned more than $11.2 billion of that amount.

“Treasury is unlikely to fully recover the difference of $1.3 billion,” the statement said.

Of course, compared to the current Federal budget, or lack thereof, $1.3 billion is basically a rounding error.

And Fiat still has to contend with the second-largest shareholder, the VEBA fund of the United Auto Workers, upon which a substantial chunk of Chrysler — currently 45.7 percent — was bestowed by the bankruptcy court.

“He’s got the hair, she’s got the shoes,” points out E. M. Zanotti in suggesting a Palin/Trump ticket:

The 2012 GOP field is full of people who we aren’t sure have met civilization yet. A number of them have names more typically found in Harry Potter books. Only one of them spent his high school years in a Dungeons & Dragons themed rock band where he played keyboards inside of a giant cocoon. The worst thing that could happen is that any of them would win the nomination. At this point, the GOP could nominate a tuna melt and it would have as good if not better chance of beating Barack Obama. So I say, why not nominate Sarah Palin and Donald Trump? At least the campaign would be entertaining.

Just think: crazy accents, giant hair (the blow drying bill for that ticket would be astounding), they’d be mostly self-funded, and together, they could drive even the most even-tempered person insane. It can’t really get better.

I’m guessing this isn’t the tuna melt in question.

Nancy Friedman reveals a new development from Big Pharma:

Pfizer’s exclusive patent rights to Viagra begin to expire next year, and the pharmaceutical company is taking what you might call prophylactic measures. This month the company will introduce generic Viagra in New Zealand under the name “Avigra” — an anagram of “Viagra.”

I predict that this practice will catch on, and that these new generics will rocket to the Top Ten on the sales charts:

10. AnVita
9. Opalrex
8. LateSun
7. Saxfoam
6. Sequel OR
5. Dread-All
4. SaneFlo
3. DocAvert
2. BeamIn
1. Coorz

Or, you know, not.

I have this ancient steam-powered cable modem of seemingly questionable parentage — all I have to do is mention the brand name and tech types stare wide-eyed and wonder how it’s still functional after seven and a half years — and the cable company warns that they will no longer be supporting it at some point in the future.

So they boxed up an even cheesier-looking box and FedExed it to me, with a page full of extremely simple instructions. I duly disconnected the old clunker, wired the new one into place, and, as instructed, called the tech-support line. I have no idea why I’d need to call them — they have the serial number, so there’s no reason they shouldn’t have the MAC address, unless they’re completely brain-dead — but I did call them, and they shunted me off to the Robotic Voice, which complained for a good half an hour that it couldn’t detect that brand-new piece of [suitable pejorative].

Well, we are not having that sort of [similarly-suitable pejorative] at Surlywood. I undid everything I did, threw the new box back into its packing material, and shoved it into a closet. I am not trying again until fifteen minutes before they shut me down entirely. And you don’t want to be the person who reads the inevitable customer-service survey I’ll be sent.

Actresses Kathryn and Megan Prescott turn 20 today. I think Kathryn, six minutes older, is on the left, but I’m not entirely sure:

Perhaps we could ask Dave Hogan of Getty Images Europe, who took this shot at the UK premiere of The Hangover, not quite a week after their 18th birthday(s).

At least they don’t dress alike.

Bertel Schmitt reports from the front line, as it were:

“I’m tired of being ashamed of where I live,” declared Mark Reuss, President of General Motors North America, at the Detroit Regional Chamber’s annual policy conference. His colleagues are likewise frustrated. “With all the national bashing of the region,” an aversion to Michigan is ingrained in the minds of potential job prospects, said Bill Ford, executive chairman of Ford Motor. Detroit is the city of long lost sex-appeal. Echoing the dejected sentiments of a clockwatching professional with a clientele of reluctant customers, Bill Ford added: “We have to do an incredible sales job to get them to come.”

If you ask me, they need to do an incredible sales job on themselves first:

1,500 business and political leaders gathered on Mackinac Island on Friday to vent their frustration with where they live.

Mackinac Island? Of course. These are Titans of Industry. You’re not going to see them hanging around a town that gets bad press, like, say, Detroit.

Suggestion for the Detroit Regional Chamber: Next year, meet in Grand Rapids.

Lindsay Beyerstein contemplates the implications — and suspects some of the origins — of MyPlate:

[T]he amino-acid intensive category is called “Protein” — not “Meat.” Historically, one of the main criticisms of the USDA guides has been their insinuation that meat and dairy products are an essential part of every healthy diet. That’s not surprising considering the lobbying might of American agribusiness. At the end of the day, the U.S. Cattlemen’s Association is a lot more powerful than whoever represents our nation’s tofu producers in Washington. So, it’s nice to see the USDA taking an ecumenical stance when it comes to recommending “protein,” as opposed to “meat.”

However, when I saw the MyPlate icon, my first thought was: “The dairy industry won big, here.” Notice that in the top right corner, there’s a separate satellite orb labelled “Dairy,” in what looks like a glass next to the plate. The visual upshot is not only that dairy is a necessary part of every healthy diet, which is simply not true, but also that Americans should drink milk with every meal. Strictly speaking, the dairy orb could represent cheese, yogurt, or milk products, but it sure looks like a glass of milk with dinner.

In the back of my mind, I see a tofu-industry lobbyist, sneaking away from K Street at lunchtime in search of a Quarter-Pounder with Cheese. (See also this sad tale by Larry Groce.)

And I endorse this bit of informed cynicism:

[O]dds are, MyPlate is itself the product of heavy lobbying, just like its predecessors. So, caveat eater.

But I’m still not going to dunk my Oreo (or Hydrox, if available) in spring water.

The host put out this bulletin yesterday:

We have some older mysql servers from older, already retired clusters, that are aging and must be offloaded to new mysql servers to avoid any hardware failures from aging hardware, and for customers to receive newer, faster mysql servers.

A list of the older servers follows, and then:

The new mysql servers are modern hardware, much more powerful and hold many more databases, which becomes a problem for moving customers who created databases before our more strict policy on database naming. Previously we allowed any name as long as it was not taken on that specific mysql server, but since a few years we have made it a requirement for names to be unique system-wide for new databases. Now these names may conflict on the new servers and require a rename to complete.

For the curious: my own databases (I have seven) had been on one of the affected machines, but were moved to a newer box two years ago. And my own naming conventions are probably sufficiently weird to avoid landing on someone else’s chosen name.

Often, the two are difficult to separate:

This story in The Times Higher Education outlines how a professor at Lehigh University saw that his students who brought laptops didn’t do as well on tests as students who took notes the old-fashioned way. The story also digs into some neurological research that says the same thing.

Essentially, our brains seem to work a little like our ears do in this respect. If you are supposed to listen to a sound, you can do it much more easily when fewer other sounds are made around you, especially if those other sounds are more pleasant or more interesting than the one you are supposed to listen to. I, for example, would pay attention to the air conditioner if you told me that’s what I was supposed to do. But if, say, Angie Harmon began talking in the background, I would pretty quickly abandon the air conditioner for a sound that is of far more interest to me.

I can multitask, sort of, but not especially well. In fact, I have basically the same issue as does Microsoft Windows: if more than one task is running, one of them gets focus, and the others are shunted into the background until such time as I can manually intervene to bring them up. I tend not to listen to the A/C; in fact, given the nature of Oklahoma summers, I don’t notice it until it cycles off. There are times when this doesn’t happen for several hours, at which time I will be startled by the sudden reduction in background noise. I am reasonably certain, though, that if Angie Harmon were to happen onto my premises, she would have my undivided attention for the duration.

According to legend, some Microsoft employees who’d reached the point when their stock options could be exercised supposedly wore a button reading “FYIFV,” the last three letters meaning “I’m Fully Vested.”

Brian J. Noggle’s John Donnelly’s Gold (Brookline, MO: Jeracor Group, 2011) is the story of four employees at a St. Louis Internet startup who were unceremoniously squeezed out of the company before they’d reached that presumably-happy status, and who were sufficiently irritated by this action to vow revenge upon the newly-arrived Chief Executive Officer.

Fortunately, John Donnelly had an ego bigger than his CEO salary: he’d gone so far as to buy a bar of gold bullion and train a webcam on it 24/7, the better to illustrate the corporate website. Which suggested a plan of action to this quartet of ex-employees: as a substitute for the vast sums they felt they were due, they would swipe the gold bar right out from under John Donnelly’s nose. There was, of course, one minor detail: tech types generally don’t have a lot of experience with breaking and entering, except to the extent that it involves passwords and databases. Still, this is a realm where you learn by doing, and so they developed a plan.

This really should not have worked as a novel: technical descriptions tend toward the mundane, and most of the techies I know are decidedly short on drama. What makes this worth your time is Noggle’s attention to detail: J. Random Noob will appreciate the extra exposition, and your local expert will nod, “Yeah, that’s exactly the way I’d do that. If I were going to do that, which of course I’m not.” There might be a hair too much geographical exposition — by the time you’re finished you should be able to hire on as a cab driver in St. Louis County — but no matter about that. The plot is more than sufficiently twisty; I’m pleased to report that I did not even come close to predicting the way it ended. And if the dialogue meanders a bit, hey, that’s the way these people talk. I’ve heard them, and so have you.

This isn’t quite, say, the Elmore Leonard version of WarGames. It is, however, an entertaining mosaic of gigabytes and grifters, and you should read it. Unless, of course, you’re John Donnelly.

(Review copy purchased from publisher.)

It’s 10 pm. Do you know where your nude pictures are?

In this weekly feature, we sort through seven days’ worth of logs, we find the funniest or lamest or least-explicable search strings, and then we unaccountably fail to tweet them to unsuspecting college students. It works a lot better than you’d think.

birdhackles:  If they’re presented to you, you may assume that you have annoyed the bird.

eggplant care:  I never much cared for eggplant, actually.

whose transmission is in the Ford Escape:  The broken one that needs a replacement? Yours.

will yellow color be ok for woman with 2 Kua number?  Only if she’s facing west.

why does the new camaro resemble a mustang:  Pony cars tend to look alike. So do ponies, come to think of it.

i am therefore i think you are therefore you stink:  You wouldn’t say that if I had a bitchin’ Camaro. Or a Mustang, not that you could tell them apart or anything.

can’t walk to the store bad urban planning:  Or you could just get yourself a bitchin’ Camaro. Or a Mustang, not that you could tell them apart or anything.

what is the motivation behind bestiality?  The realization that your entire species spurns you. And if they didn’t before, they will now.

sonicstage won’t import from iTunes:  Won’t work the other way around, either. Damned old proprietary formats.

“oklahoma” “republicans” “ban everything”:  Naw. Just taxes and Democrats. And it would never work, mostly because once they got rid of the taxes their salaries would stop.

washington drivers suck:  I theorize that the Beltway drives them insane.

opposite of joyride:  Whatever it is, I’m sure it involves the D.C. Beltway.

I mean, really:

Database administrator Barbara Faye Dunning was presumably not impressed.

(Via FAILBlog’s WIN!)

“Gotta have my bowl, gotta have cereal,” says Rebecca Black at 7 am, but increasingly, ready-to-eat cereal is taking a back seat to other breakfast choices:

Sales of ready-to-eat cereals fell 2.55% in the 52 weeks ending April 17 to $6.41 billion, according to data from Symphony/IRI which covers retail outlets such as supermarkets. Sales of cheap, private label cereals dropped 7.2% to $637.5 million during that same time frame. Sales and units shipped have been lackluster since at least 2007, predating the global recession and the recent rise in grain prices.

The alternatives have more portability and less sugar:

Cereal is under assault from many quarters. Government officials want to further restrict the use of carton characters such as Toucan Sam to sell sugary cereals because of concerns about soaring rates of childhood obesity. Companies have been reducing the amount of sugar in their products. They are also selling them in other ways such as breakfast bars, sales of which are soaring.

Of the six cereals performing the worst on the sales charts, five are from Kellogg’s, led (or trailed) by Special K, down nearly 16 percent since 2007. Also suffering: Rice Krispies, to the extent that the product is now viewed as a component of a snack food rather than as an actual breakfast cereal.

Then again, he’d pretty much have to say that, wouldn’t he?

[H]ow can one get in contact with an expert who can roll back the odometer on a 2010 or 2011 Nissan Pathfinder (digital odometer) and not get caught when the lease is up? Is there an instrument/procedure that one can use in order to change the display on the digital odometer such that the odometer reflects less than 39,000 miles when the vehicle’s lease has expired?

Please discuss this procedure or if you feel more comfortable, send me a private note describing this procedure and how to find a local expert who would be capable and willing to do this for a fee and it’s critical that this modification NOT be recognizable to the parties involved when returning the leased vehicle.

Thank you, in advance, for providing me with such helpful educational material that IN NO WAY would be used for illegal purposes nor fraud of any sort.

I need to boil this down to a metalaw, or at least a metacorollary, to supplement the existing wisdom: “When the first thing they tell you is ‘We are a legitimate business,’ run like hell.”

Once upon a time in the DC Universe, there was a young lady who had taken the name Triplicate Girl because she could be in three places at once, a capability I know I’d have found handy from time to time. The Legion of Super-Heroes was certainly happy to have her.

Then one of Brainiac 5′s nastier schemes killed her at one of those three places, after which, logically, she could be in only two places at once. She was accordingly renamed Duo Damsel, and continued her work with the Legion, until one day she showed up on a bus tour:

(Purloined from a Wizbang Weekend Caption Contest. None of the 100 or so entries I read went down this particular path, which surprises me not at all.)

You remember the Incredible Hulk. Largish guy, a bit on the green side, given to SMASH! things when provoked. Marvel sold a bazillion comics with his darker-than-chartreuse self on the cover.

Unfortunately, the incessant Michael Baying of motion pictures has led us, or at least Sonic Charmer, to a quandary:

I know what you’re thinking, you’re thinking “duh. A guy transforms into a giant green monster due to ‘gamma radiation’, and you call it implausible? It’s a comic book concept. Duh!” And, other things involving me being an idiot. But hold your horses. Can you answer me something:

Why/how do the guy’s teeth get bigger?

This wasn’t something you thought about at all in the comics, or very much in the Ang Lee Hulk film. But bring it into a “reboot” that’s all about the FX, and the brain refuses to go along with the handwaving in the screenplay:

Far as I can tell from the video-game-quality CGI, the Hulk’s size is proportionally bigger than Edward Norton/Eric Bana’s size in basically all respects. It’s not just that his muscles got bigger in the sense of having taken super-steroids or something. He gets way taller — sometimes, it seems, way way taller. Let’s say the factor is 2.3x. (Who the hell can say … one major annoyance of both movies is a seeming inability to keep the scale consistent.) This means that all his bones got longer: 2.3x longer femur, 2.3x longer tibia, etc.

Which means about a factor of twelve, volumetrically speaking. And somehow this seems less plausible for dentition:

The teeth appear to be the right size for his (suddenly way oversized) head. There’s only one thing this can mean: As part of the Hulk transformation, all your teeth get bigger: they get longer and they get wider. Then when things die down, all the teeth shrink again.

Seriously? Why? Why would the teeth do that? And how?

Hey, if I knew that I could end gingivitis in our lifetime: a few well-placed gamma rays, and bingo!

At least he’s not sending pictures of his Mega-Junk to the girls. And if that concept wasn’t gross enough, try this one from several years back:

A few eons ago, Sheri S. Tepper wrote of Mavin Manyshaped, one of a clan of shapeshifters, who, once her powers develop, flees from the family compound, lest she be abused like the other women in the clan. Mavin takes her younger brother with her; to speed the process along, she assumes the shape of a horse.

So far, this is a fairly routine fantasy concept, but Tepper is never routine. If you think about it — obviously she did — the Mavin/horse is going to have to eat, and eat a lot, during a long journey like this, and once she returns to human form, well, what’s going to happen to all that bulk she was carrying as an equine?

And we were worrying about teeth.

Book your next ride on Foothill Area Rapid Transit. “You’ll have a gas with F.A.R.T.”

(Via this Nancy Friedman tweet.)

Let me say up front that I do like this three-inch-tall Isaac Mizrahi sandal, given the mundane designation “520,” a number which falls short of its actual list price:

But what I really wanted you to see was this description by galligator at ShoeBlog:

While I am generally too terrified to actually wear this particular type of non-ankle-strapped sandal — as it would likely result in my lying on the couch with an icepack over a painfully twisted ankle — I absolutely love seeing them on folks who do not have my own personal (and less-than-graceful) tendency of walking into known-location, fixed-objects such as end tables and desks.

That, I’m sure many of you can appreciate.

More pictures and descriptions at this link.

Dave Schuler comes up with his idea of Seven Things That Should Be Done to improve the state of the economy, of which this is the fifth:

Conclude some of the free trade deals we’ve already negotiated.

While we’re at it maybe nudge them in the direction of real, honest free trade rather than the pretend free trade agreements we usually end up with. You can write a free trade agreement on the back of a business card. When the agreement runs to hundreds or thousands of pages you can be pretty sure it isn’t about free trade.

Nope. It’s going to be about people trying to game the system. Now admittedly, so long as you have a system, there will be people trying to game it. But geez, guys, the whole US Constitution is less than five thousand words. You don’t need a thousand pages to regulate bananas, and if you do, you’re either incompetent and/or dishonest. Period.

A Facebook friend in eastern Kansas sent up a snapshot of the gauge panel in his car, which was showing a temperature reading of 111° F. I responded thusly:

My car won’t volunteer a temperature unless you request it; I figured I didn’t want to know.

This is in fact true: the short-of-weapons-grade HVAC system Nissan crammed into the dash has only enough LEDs to display the temperature setting and the fan distribution. You want the outside temp, you have to push the AMB(ient) button on the side.

And it occurred to me later that this is not the first thing I didn’t want to know. Nissan provides the usual six-digit odo (no tenths) and two trip meters, labeled A and B. I am meticulous about logging fillups on the B meter — and then I keep the display set to A, so I don’t spend time wondering if I’m getting lousier gas mileage than usual. (Before you ask: unless I’m on a road trip, A measures the distance since the last oil change.)

While we’re on the subject: OG&E, having bestowed upon me a Smart Meter, sends me a link for an energy-use update once a week. I usually don’t look at any of them until approximately five days before the scheduled meter reading, lest I become despondent.

Lileks has been there, and perhaps so have you:

Bought a new printer tonight, because I needed ink. I’ve been down this road before, and yes, I know, the printers you buy have just sixteen atoms of ink, and you have to buy expensive cartridges right away. But: the old printer — by which I mean something purchased a year ago — became senile and confused, and did not recognize the Genuine Epson Cartridge I put in to replace an old one. (It goes without saying that the machine refused to print a simple letter because it was out of MAGENTA. The only time anyone who’s not in printing ever thinks of magenta is when the magenta is out, and you can’t print a greyscale document. Then you wonder exactly how you used all the magenta in the first place.) I could either assume that the ink was old — meaning, a code in the cartridge said “he bought this a year ago. Dude obviously doesn’t use enough ink. Screw him” and reported that it was defective, or the chip was defective, or the machine’s ability to detect a new cartridge was defective.

As Meat Loaf (inevitably quoting Jim Steinman) would wail: “IT’S DEFECTIVE!”

I had a lot of fun this spring with this cute little color laser at the office. I expected, given that this is largely a work machine, that the black would give out first; I had not expected that the yellow would be right behind. (Cyan and magenta? Meh.) I did discover, though, that ignoring roughly forty percent of the precautions on the Cartridge Replacement Guide, a four-language sheet large enough to wrap all but a handful of Christmas presents, replete with drawings inspired by the caves at Lascaux, was the wisest, or anyway least painful, course of action.

I saw a line of Kodak printers, which I’ve been eyeing for some time. Why? Cheap ink. That’s why. That’s all.

That’s enough. I have one of those. Combo pack, black and color cartridges — $30. Consumption rate seems rather high, but everyone’s consumption rate seems rather high these days, and I tend to run ink supplies down to the Coughing Up Dust level.

As I might have mentioned before, I don’t spend valuable driving time wondering about gas mileage; after gathering five years of data on this car, I know how much I’m supposed to be getting, and I’m pretty much always getting it. (Revised EPA is 17 city/25 highway; original sticker was 20/28; I average 21/28.)

Besides, I don’t want to be this guy:

My gas mileage reader goes down every time I step on brakes. If I am in park for a while it goes all they way down to 0. Does this mean there is something wrong with my car or that my gas is burning too fast???

Do the math, Binky. If you’re not moving, you’re traveling zero miles, and zero miles divided by any amount of fuel is 0 mpg.

If you’re going to obsess over fuel consumption, you have basically two choices:

• Buy a farging Prius already. It will get better mileage than anything else you’ve ever owned before, including your dad’s ancient moped.
• Take the bus and STFU.

Disclosure: My dad did once have a moped. It was a sad little two-wheeler, but it went faster than I could pedal, therefore I was envious. I got over it.

Today Bollywood actress Shilpa Shetty turns 36, and you don’t know how long I’ve been waiting to use that title.

You’re looking at a still from her 2006 film Shaadi Karke Phas Gaya Yaar [Trapped in a Marriage]. It was, by all accounts, a fairly non-controversial film for a distinctly controversial actress.

Retail expert Steve Sailer explains the, or at least a, difference between Target and Costco:

Target might carry 100 different varieties of shampoo, while Costco carries about three. Thus, Target has lots of pretty girls shopping there, people to whom choosing the perfect shampoo is an important gambit in the mating game, worth expending scarce mental energy upon.

Costco, in contrast, has very few pretty girls among its customers. Most shoppers look like they have kids and are shopping for 3 to 5 people, and thus they aren’t willing to finetune their purchases to meet individual idiosyncrasies: just give us something cheap and respectable.

We don’t have a Costco nearby — I suspect the establishment of the very first Sam’s Club, out on SE 29th Street, may have discouraged them — but I get better results scoping out the babes at higher-end grocers than I do at Tar-ZHAY.

On the other hand, Costco and Target aren’t polar opposites either:

The opposite of the Costco shopping experience is car shopping. Dealers work very hard to make to make buying a car a stressful experience that preys upon your class insecurities. Their ultimate goal is to make you want to impress the salesman by overpaying for the car.

And doesn’t everyone want to impress a guy in a plaid jacket? No? Surely the dealership can find some freshly-shampooed young woman at a Target store somewhere and teach her to sell cars.