Hadn’t heard from her since November, and it’s not like she’s learned any new songs since then, but I suppose there’s something to be said for consistency.

You may remember this from a couple of summers ago. The original has gone 404, so the link comes back here:

When I first began working here, only one of the four writers in my department consistently used the serial comma. The other three would accept my edits when I imposed it onto their writing, but they kept sending me drafts in which it was omitted.

So I decided to make evangelizing the serial comma my personal mission. I explained to them why the serial comma was the superior choice for clarity. I wrote the classic “To my parents, Ayn Rand and God” example on their whiteboards to demonstrate why omitting it was confusing. I complained about how I can’t tell how many items are in a list if I’m unfamiliar with the terms and they don’t use the serial comma.

The serial comma was also referred to as the “Oxford comma,” but even Oxford is disowning it:

As a general rule, do not use the serial/Oxford comma: so write ‘a, b and c’ not ‘a, b, and c’. But when a comma would assist in the meaning of the sentence or helps to resolve ambiguity, it can be used — especially where one of the items in the list is already joined by ‘and’: They had a choice between croissants, bacon and eggs, and muesli.

I suppose it’s better than Spam, egg, sausage and Spam.

The following dialogue took place on the original poster’s Facebook page:

O.P.:  They can have my Oxford/serial comma when they pry it from my cold, dead hands.

Wiseguy (not I):  You mean cold, dead, hands?

O.P.:  No, it would have to be something like cold, dead, and pedantic hands.

Holy position reversal, Batmanglij!

(Vampire Weekend’s original commentary on the subject.)

Readers of a certain age will likely remember this song, which mentioned a funny-looking dog with a big black nose:

Ten, twenty, thirty, forty, fifty or more
The bloody Red Baron was rollin’ up the score
Eighty men died tryin’ to end that spree
Of the bloody Red Baron of Germany

Basil begs to differ ever so slightly:

Yes, Baron Manfred Albrecht von Richthofen did shoot down 80 planes. But not everyone on every plane died. Some were single-seat aircraft, but most were 2-seaters. A total of 126 fighters were shot down by Richthofen. 23 were unhurt (or not reported as hurt), 20 were wounded, 1 was of unknown status, and 82 were killed.

Here’s the list of 80 planes. Basil says this has been bothering him for years, which I can believe. And this is probably not the time to mention that near the end of the instrumental break, the Royal Guardsmen shift into a few bars of “Louie, Louie.”

After restructuring my finances last year, I no longer have any credit cards, which is a blessing in terms of debt, but a pain in the neck in terms of convenience. My bank gives me a Visa check card, but I am loath to do much online shopping with it, lest some miscreant find a way to tap the whole of my checking account while I’m not looking. Then again, for all I know, they might be using skimmers down at the gas station.

There are always prepaid cards, but they tend to come with a metric buttload of fees:

First up: an activation fee to secure a card. Such fees average $5 but at least one provider, Millennium Advantage, has charged $99.95 according to the nonprofit group Consumers Union. After that, customers typically pay $3 to $10 each time they load the card with cash. Monthly maintenance fees average about $5, but can be double that amount. ATM withdrawals can cost $2.50. Printing an account summary can cost up to $5.95. And some cards even charge to close the account.

From stage right comes the white knight, and it wasn’t whom you expected. American Express (!), not known for its solicitousness toward unbanked folks, has a new prepaid card with exactly two fees:

• If you refill it with cash, you go through GreenDot, which costs $4.95;
• Second ATM withdrawal of the month costs $2 (not including any fees imposed by the owner of the ATM).

However, you can refill the card from a bank account or (yeah, right) from an existing Amex account, for which they charge you zip. So it’s not like they’re doing poor folks a favor. Still, many of the same bennies that go with the high-zoot Amex cards also apply to the prepaid.

The ways of Amex, I have learned through personal experience, can be inscrutable. On the other hand, they’re more of a known quantity than the competition in this market, and I’d rather deal with them than with someone who would have the temerity to charge $100 as an activation fee. (If you order from the Amex web site, the fee is $0, right in my price range.)

Is Rebecca Black last Friday’s news? ABC’s Good Morning America (where she once sang an “unplugged” version of That Song) and Ark Music Factory (where the original video was produced) held a Los Angeles-area competition to find the next teenage viral-video star, and here’s your, or at least their, winner:

And it’s getting positive response so far on YouTube. Then again, it was negative response that created the Rebecca Black phenomenon. I’ll say only that I like this particular tune, and I wish Lexi St. George all the best. Hope that wasn’t a complete buzzkill.

How do you solve a problem like urea?

(Linked to this.)

Zombie apocalypse? Nothing so exciting, predicts Tam:

Every year, the shelves of America creak louder under ever-thickening volumes of federal, state and local laws and regulations, codes and ordinances. I’m telling you, while all the worrywarts are handwringing about the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland, it’s gonna be some law library in New Jersey that collapses into a singularity and destroys the planet…

I figure they’ll blame Chris Christie for not taxing that black hole when he had the chance.

Please allow me to quote myself:

Communications from Infiniti to yours truly have always been somewhat obsequious, the presumption being that an owner of one of these glorified Nissans somehow expects this sort of thing, or at least will respond to the corporate up-suck.

Especially, you know, after a two-page service invoice, which says up in the corner:

note: Infiniti may call and/or send you a C.S.I. survey. If for any reason you can not answer ***Excellent*** on the phone survey or the written survey please contact us!!

LeeAnn, of course, is onto this sort of scheme:

[T]he main thing is, and I learned this from a few In The Know people, unless you give the superlative answer to all questions, it doesn’t count. It goes all null and void and you might as well have accused them of sleeping with livestock or being politicians.

And indeed I have gotten better-than-decent service from this dealer, five years running, but I really dislike the idea that I’m contributing to some form of grade inflation. I’ve already blown off the phone survey; let’s see if they send me a letter.

You, however, can call her Rocsi:

Rocsi, born Raquel Roxanne Diaz in Honduras in 1983, is a host of BET’s 106 & Park, a television series that used to be produced at, yes, 106th Street and Park Avenue, until Viacom bought out BET and moved production to an existing CBS facility a few miles to the south.

Rocsi was barely a year old when the Roxanne Wars broke out, so take the title here with several grains of salt.

For the last several years, Formula One racers have used small (no larger than 2.4 liter) V8s, amazingly oversquare, with a rev limit of 18,000 rpm. For 2014, F1 is expected to go to a turbocharged 1.6-liter V6, the blower presumably serving as a replacement for displacement. (Then again, Ferrari’s first racers had a 1.5-liter V12.)

It must be noted, though, that what F1 was originally planning was a four-cylinder engine, apparently for the sake of Perceived Greenness. If that’s the goal, Tim Blair suggests a better way of getting there:

…a simple fuel rule that would give all competitors a fixed amount per race — setting engineers the challenge of extracting the best performance from that amount, by whatever means they choose.

You can’t get a whole lot greener than that, since the penalty for using too much fuel is the worst possible for a racer: a DNF. But F1, like present-day NASCAR, is obsessed with reducing the differences between cars, under the delusion that it will put the audience’s focus squarely on driving skill. Anyone who’s ever been to a “run what you brung” event is probably already laughing.

And speaking of F1, they’re bringing their road show to Austin, Texas, a place I dearly love, but you may be certain that Portland-on-the-Colorado is getting in its Greener Than Thou licks.

This startling revelation appeared in the Telegraph:

The formula for a perfect woman’s foot is a size five, wearing three inch heels and red toe nail varnish, according to the study.

A study discovered men find size five feet, such as those belonging to Victoria Beckham, Kim Kardashian and Sophia Loren, are the most alluring.

That makes sense on this side of the pond only if you apply the conversion factor: size 5 in the UK is a 7 in the States. I question the need for the heel; I mean, really, are you going to turn away Sophia Loren in flats? (At right: Sophia Loren in flats.) And an ill-fitting shoe — lot of those going around these days — never helps matters.

Acidman, of course, would have heartily endorsed the red polish.

More years ago than I’d like to think about, I dated a woman who wore size 4. (To the Brits, that’s a 2.) She could literally stand in my hand, though I definitely preferred that she not wear heels when so doing. And she complained that finding shoes was a difficult proposition, with so many manufacturers sticking to the 5-through-10 scale.

Research by foot plaster company Compeed revealed nearly half of men will look at a woman’s feet on a first date and a third will make a character judgement based on the state of them.

That way, I suggest, lies madness. What sort of character judgment, other than “fastidious” or “not so fastidious,” can be made on that basis?

The poll of 2,000 adults found four out of ten women go to extreme lengths to cover their unkempt feet in the summer by hiding them in boots or shoes… Six out of ten women admit to trying to hide their feet from other people because they are self-conscious.

This must be something in the British temperament, because it doesn’t seem to come close to the reality of an Oklahoma summer.

(Via Fark.)

This time around, Andrew Ian Dodge is happily (I assume) CoTVing into the 4th, just in time for Independence Day, with the 428th edition of Carnival of the Vanities.

Speaking of 428, it was in that year that Armenia’s newly-minted king, Artaxias IV, was deposed. This did not bring any form of independence to the region, however: Bahram Gur, who ruled the Sassanid Empire, the last of the pre-Islamic Persian empires, annexed eastern Armenia, declared it a province, and installed a governor.

Wisconsin firefighter Matt Gorniak is bringing back a locally-famous parade float:

[A] re-enactment of the famous photo of three firefighters raising the American flag amid the rubble of the World Trade Center … created a rush of emotions as it passed through three parade routes in Milwaukee County back in 2002. Crowds spontaneously rose to their feet, offering thunderous applause.

With the 10th anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks coming up later this year, Gorniak and his church’s youth group decided to revive the float in Racine’s upcoming Independence Day parade, one of the biggest in the area.

Conspicuous by their absence will be any of his fellow firefighters:

Gorniak had recently invoked a little-used provision in his union contract and opted out of membership in the Professional Fire Fighters of Wisconsin.

Members of the executive board of the Racine firefighters union ultimately decided not to support or march with his float.

How that provision works:

Under state law, public employees can drop out of the union and opt to pay just their “fair share” for the cost the union incurs for negotiating contracts. These nonvoting employees don’t have to foot the bill for the union’s political, social and ideological activities.

Officials say it is highly unusual for Wisconsin firefighters to ask to go fair share. But Gorniak — who describes himself as a born-again Christian who supports conservative politicians, including Gov. Scott Walker — filed his resignation letter and became a fair-share worker in late March or early April. He said he made the move in response to the protests in Madison over Walker’s collective-bargaining plan.

And God forbid your conscience should take precedence over the all-important Ideological Dollars.

(Via Christopher Johnson.)

On Form 511-G, Oklahoma taxpayers due refunds can donate a portion to any of about a dozen more or less charitable organizations, including the Oklahoma Pet Overpopulation Fund and a Low Income Health Care Fund. Other states have similar programs, though Illinois does it differently: they don’t actually hand the money over to the intended organizations. Instead, they use it to pay current bills:

Illinoisans donated almost $45,000 on their 2009 state income tax returns to crisis nurseries in Illinois, part of a checkoff system designed to help charitable causes.

None of that money has reached the Crisis Nursery of Champaign County — or any other nursery across the state.

Instead, the money is being used to pay other state bills, at least temporarily.

In all, state officials have borrowed $1.176 million in fiscal 2011 from 11 tax checkoff funds, according to figures provided by the Office of Management and Budget.

The state swears it will make good:

[T]he money borrowed in fiscal 2011 by law has to be returned, plus interest, within 18 months, said Kelly Kraft, spokeswoman for the Office of Management and Budget.

Still, if word of this gets around, a lot of people will be reacting the way Marcel did:

I’ve never done that, because I didn’t trust the state. Turns out mistrust was justified.

All the more reason to spread the word, I think.

Sonic Charmer downgrades Super 8 to about 6.5 for an excess of mistimed cultural references:

If I were to have one gripe about the film, it’s that it gets so much about the period wrong. Why bother setting a period movie so specifically — June something 1979 — if you’re not going to do your research, even basic wiki’ing:

Rubik’s cube? Not yet sorry. The Walkman? Released in Japan first, later that year. “Don’t Bring Me Down” by ELO? July 1979. The kids sing “My Sharona” — only just released, not #1 on the charts till later that year. Three Mile Island meltdown? March not June. One kid says “awesome” as kid-slang for “great”, which I’m afraid I can’t admit into evidence till perhaps 1981-82.

The ELO reference at first threw me, since the Discovery LP was in fact released in June, but he’s right: the first single off the album was “Shine a Little Love,” which was sneaked out in May. “Don’t Bring Me Down” wasn’t released as a 45 until mid-July.

Of course, what amazes me is the persistence of “awesome,” which is still in heavy rotation in the vocabularies of seemingly everyone under thirty.

Jhunjhunu is a city of about 115,000 in northwest India, and apparently that’s enough for the local administration:

Get sterilized and drive away in a Nano car. This is what the medical and health department of Rajasthan’s Jhunjhunu has offered people to check population growth.

Well, one person, anyway. Tata’s bodacious minicar is only one of several incentives being offered:

The prizes include a Nano car, five motorcycles, five 21-inch colour TVs and seven mixer-grinders. “The aim is to encourage sterilisation in the district,” said Jhunjhunu CMO Sitaram Sharma. Provisional Census 2011 shows an 11.8% population growth in Jhunjhunu in ten years.

(Seen at Autoblog.)

Computer security packages — formerly known as “antivirus software” — almost invariably evolve in the same direction: fatter, slower, more intrusive. I went through seven years of Norton on the notebook, and each new incarnation was more blubbery. Worse, Symantec seemed to be charging by the perceived pound. Out it went, replaced by Eset, which behaves itself better.

Eset will be going on my desktop when license-renewal comes around, near the end of the year. Having banished CA’s product for a variety of offenses, I temporarily swapped in a freebie: Avira’s, which cost nothing more than the indignity of a single pop-up ad at each update. It was a very efficient program — their “Luke Filewalker” routine scanned 800,000 files on this box in three hours — and otherwise kept out of the way.

Then came their newest version, which wanted to install a toolbar. I went into Cee Lo Green mode and propelled it off the premises. This leaves a few months to fill, and I have filled them with, of all things, a Microsoft product.

MS Security Essentials had, I reasoned, one advantage: it might keep up with the Redmond Patch-of-the-Week Club. (This is Eset’s one small failing: if it loads up and deems you to be missing the latest and greatest Microsoft hole-filler, it whines at you.) Haven’t been able to check that yet. Its scanner, however, is thorough, if not especially speedy, and in addition to the usually-expected dubious Java exploits, it found two gag programs from the 1980s, buried in an old self-extracting Zip file, that nobody else’s scanner had so much as acknowledged.

I have also installed this on my work box, thereby saving the department the cost of one AV license. My generosity clearly knows no bounds.

(Title from Cheech y Chong.)

About every seven days or so, we go through the logs, and once in a while we find some real comic gold, though regular readers will note that we’ll settle for pyrite — or zinc, even — if that’s all we can get.

fun t shirt speed limit 4 pisquare:  Yeah, but my speedometer is calibrated in natural logarithms.

“men who are witty”:  Get girls who are pretty. Or so I keep telling myself.

want to purchase thallanylzirconio:  NZT is to Limitless what the Nissan Skyline is to The Fast and the Furious. Your chances of getting your hands on either are essentially nil.

Sarah Palin In Garterbelt And Nylons:  Your chances of getting your hands on either are essentially nil.

Darnell Mayberry & The Lost Ogle:  Neo-bluegrass band from East Virginia with new album A Little Dobro’ll Do Ya. Featuring “Cardboard Jim” Traber.

nudist skinny dipping:  Well, that goes without saying, doesn’t it?

there’s a zombie in my brain…  Probably just foraging for food.

nine west fred allard is a jerk:  I shudder to think how you’d respond to Karl Lagerfeld at Chanel.

sexy dress to attract husband:  Yeah, but whose husband?

peter noone cut or uncut:  I have no idea. Have you asked Mrs Brown’s daughter? She’s quite lovely.

funny he doesn t look jewish:  Glad we could clear that up for you.

(Found, perhaps, by a Church Lady at FAILBlog’s That Will Buff Out.)

A recent dialogue between a teacher and a professional term-paper writer yielded up this warning:

I was alerted to plagiarism by the sudden appearance, in a paper that is otherwise a morass of grammatical errors, of a series of flawless sentences with complicated structures. The correct use of a semicolon is a big red flag for me. As is the use — and often misuse — of specialized jargon or technical language that I’ve not discussed with them in class. Then I type those sentences into Google, and they all wind up being smoking-gun cases of plagiarism.

Hmmm. I get rather a lot of those in the search logs, but examples of misuse seem to outnumber examples of use.

Although there’s still a lot of this:

My favorite case this semester was plagiarism within plagiarism. When I informed this student that I suspected her paper was plagiarized, she said to me, “I got my paper from one of the students who was in your class last semester. How was I to know that she had plagiarized?”

(Via Dispatches from the Culture Wars.)

What do you do when your own personal aesthetic starts to shift? Tavi, four years into the fashion-blogger scene but still barely fifteen, is left with a quandary:

I took this picture a couple months ago, going for some Heathers/Twin Peaks vibes, but started thinking too much about how I look in it and avoided posting it for a while. I wasn’t insecure, quite the opposite — I didn’t want to post this photo because I look good in it. And, as someone whose “thing” for so long has been “Challenge beauty standards! Screw convention! Look like a grandmother on ecstasy at Fashion Week!”, that somehow felt hypocritical.

One of the factors, apparently, was No More Glasses:

Before I got contacts in March, I just never really counted myself in the general pool of people who might be considered attractive. I wasn’t insecure about how I looked, I just made peace with the fact that I wasn’t, to me, an attractive person, and decided to milk my charming personality instead. The glasses were an easy way to isolate myself from even having to consider keeping up some kind of face. Then I slowly came to feel that, well, maybe I did want my face to be visible. Maybe I liked my face. Is that not okay?

Now I admit to having read Style Rookie since 2008. When Tavi crashed the pages of The New Yorker last year, it suddenly occurred to me that omigod, there might be a swan there, albeit still playing those comfortable duckling games.

If I’d been paying closer attention, I’d have seen this on Tumblr:

i think i’m pretty now, at least applied to my own idea of pretty, which for me comes from all the things i really love, all the sometimes ugly books and movies and what i see on the walk to school, and i’m more intrigued by the idea of looking like a reflection of that and internalizing it and feeling like a part of everything i really love. and i don’t even think there is anything very subversive about what i look like/how i dress anyway?

Three months later, the internalization isn’t exactly seamless:

Right now, I could pretend to be an archetype of a feminist superhero and say I never want to be a conventionally attractive person. But, while I have so much respect for the people who can say that truthfully, I’m not there yet. I think it would be, in my case, much more effective to be honest and willing to have this conversation instead of signing myself to a stereotype I can’t fit. I admit to the basic human desire to be attractive. That’s certainly not all I want to be, and I’m not bending over backwards every morning for it, but it’s there.

The question in my mind: is she actually going in that direction, or will she decide that beauty is a form of currency, and work on building a nest egg?

Because there’s something here that doesn’t quite add up:

People who are conventionally attractive have the privilege of going through life knowing their appearance will usually not act as a barrier in accomplishing what they want to accomplish. Of course, this is a general statement, but typically, Pretty Woman does not have to worry about missing out on opportunities because of her appearance. (Pretty Woman also gets Richard Gere.)

There are, I suspect, occupational fields where said PW will miss out on opportunities because of her appearance, because she won’t be taken seriously; Dr. Christmas Jones, the nuclear physicist in The World Is Not Enough, seems decidedly atypical, and not just because she happens to run into James Bond. There’s nothing in the world that says that someone who looks like Denise Richards can’t operate a world-class weapons system, but rather a lot of people are used to seeing a grizzled old man in that chair — and some of them, it’s reasonable to assume, have some emotional investment in that familiarity.

So for the moment I’m filtering this through “She’s only fifteen.” This may be giving her short shrift, inasmuch as I was dumb as a post when I was fifteen, that whole National Merit thing notwithstanding, but I figure she’s got plenty of time, and she’ll have several opportunities to change her mind yet again, should she be so inclined.

I caught this item among the various vintage ads Found in Mom’s Basement, and I pass it on to you:

The late Allan Sherman reworked “Chim Chim Cher-ee” into a satire on American advertising, and referenced the product this way:

“What does that blue magic whitener do?
Does it make blue things white, or make white things blue?”

Your mom knew the answer to that, of course.

Many years later, a band called Blue Cheer would come down with the Summertime Blues.

As with any other human activity, there are risks involved with visiting a clothing-optional beach: sunburn, getting sand in places where sand ought not to be, and perhaps the most exasperating of all:

It’s usually a man who arrives with no book, no cooler, and most tellingly, no sunscreen. Clearly he intends to stay just long enough to snap some nude photos.

In days of old, when cameras were large and easily spotted at a distance, this wasn’t such a big deal: the “visitor” would be approached and his film would be flung into the sea. This sort of confrontation is discouraged these days, and besides, rather a lot of these places are under Federal jurisdiction, where both nudity and photography are legal.

A friend of mine who visited a beach in Florida this year says she wasn’t accosted by photographers, but she was bothered a bit by one fellow who parked himself in her line of sight and then proceeded to apply SPF 800 to his twig and berries — in increments of 8 or 16 — while utterly neglecting the rest of his person.

Okay, go ahead and laugh. I might give out with a chuckle here and there. On the other hand, if Toyota wants to bolt some performance parts onto its meek hybrid, who am I to complain?

The Prius PLUS Performance Package starts with a seven-piece aerodynamic ground effects kit that delivers an aggressive and lower-profile stance. It includes front and rear bumper spoilers, sleek side skirts and a uniquely styled rear diffuser. The custom body kit was aerodynamically designed and engineered to reduce the vehicle’s coefficient of drag, maintaining its already great fuel efficiency.

And kudos to the Big T for not claiming, as might an aftermarket firm, that fuel efficiency would go up with a body kit.

Complementing the body kit are race-inspired 17-inch forged alloy wheels. The higher strength-to-weight ratio reduces the unsprung weight, assists in keeping the corner weight down and performance up, while maintaining the Prius’ overall light vehicle weight and high fuel efficiency. The wheels are fitted with low profile 215/45R17 tires and have a custom offset, which increases track width yet maintaining Prius’ low rolling resistance. The attractive split five-spoke pattern with a liquid metal protective finish will keep the appearance looking great.

Base tires on the Prius are 195/65R15, so this is a major change. The custom offset means that aftermarket suppliers will have a problem making sport wheels for Prii, but Toyota undoubtedly sees this as a feature.

And while there aren’t any actual go-fast pieces in the package, there are some handling benefits to be had:

The performance side of the PLUS package delivers excellent traction and handling that will surprise any automotive enthusiast without sacrificing fuel efficiency. The track-tuned lowering springs lower the vehicle 1.1 inches in the front and 1.3 inches in the rear. This enhances the vehicle’s on-road performance through quicker turn-in, enhanced steering response and improved cornering ability. A tuned rear sway bar is added to help reduce body lean for flatter cornering and maneuverability. This helps provide the driver control and confidence while touring, mountain driving or just plain having fun. The sway bar is constructed of high carbon spring steel, powder coated to prevent corrosion and road damage.

Still no irs for the Prius, but space considerations are likely the controlling factor. (Heck, my medium-zoot sedan has a solid beam out back, and you don’t hear me complain. Much.)

I have to wonder if all these boy-racer parts herald a general Manning Up in the industry. Shucks, even the new New Beetle (officially designated “Beetle” without the qualifier) has been reskinned for reduced perceived simper.

TOLLROADSnews looks at the Sam Rayburn Tollway (aka State Highway 121) across the north Dallas metro:

[TX 121] is a typical modern Texan urban highway with the grade separated interchanges for the tolled mainline lanes which are straddled by parallel frontage road lanes. These frontage roads provide access and egress to and from the expressway lanes via simple slip ramps. They also allow untolled trips for motorists who will endure traffic signals at the at-grade intersections with cross-streets.

It might be a little bit more flexible than, say, Maryland’s Intercounty Connector:

The MDICC is a simple 3+3 lanes expressway with two fancy expressway-to-expressway interchange (at US29 and I-95) plus six other simple local diamond interchanges (MD355, Shady Grove Metro parking, MD97, MD182, MD650, Virginia Manor Rd).

Otherwise, these are fairly similar roads, both intended to take some traffic away from existing arterials, both set up for electronic tolling, and neither burdened with river crossings or anything complicated like that.

The Texas road, 26 miles long, cost $1.43 billion; the 18-mile Maryland road cost $2.57 billion. There are several reasons for this disparity, but one of the biggest was that the only question about the Sam Rayburn was who was going to build it in the first place, the toll authority or a private-sector concessionaire. In Maryland, however, the NIMBYs were out in full force, and, says the News, “Build/no-build conflict tends to produce added cost in delay and projects to ‘buy off’ environmentalist opponents.”

Most of Texas’ road-construction workforce is nonunion. By law, none of Maryland’s is.

And there’s this:

The state of Maryland came in with GARVEE bonds (grant anticipation revenue) bonds and an appropriation from general funds for about half the costs of the MDICC so there was much less pressure to contain costs than in Texas where the state DOT and the regional toll authority was expected to fully fund the TX121SRT.

ODOT doesn’t have any big schemes like this on its plate, but they’re still trying to finish the Crosstown Expressway 2.0 before the 3.0 version becomes necessary.

Willis Eschenbach spots an assertion in Science that can’t possibly be that precise:

In their June 10th edition, in their “BY THE NUMBERS” section, they quote Nature Climate Change magazine, viz:

1,211,287: Square kilometers of ice road-accessible Arctic lands that will be unreachable by 2050, a 14% decrease, according to a report online 29 May in Nature Climate Change.

In other news, there is a publication called Nature Climate Change.

Now surely, if they can call this to the square kilometer, they ought to be able to pinpoint an exact date and time: say, 1 April 2050 at 6 am GMT. Heck, Bishop Ussher was doing that much four and a half centuries ago.

Says Eschenbach:

The idea that a hyper-accurate claim like that would not only get published in a peer-reviewed journal, but would be cited by another peer-reviewed journal, reveals just how low the climate science bar is these days. Mrs. Henniger, my high school science teacher, would have laughed such a claim out of the classroom. “Significant digits!” she would thunder.

I don’t expect to be around in 2050, but I think it’s a pretty safe bet that this guesstimate is off somewhere between 0.5 and two million square kilometers.

Steve Sailer on “yes-he-did” “no-he-didn’t” Dominique Strauss-Kahn:

[T]he [current] story is that she filed the false rape charge because DSK refused to pay her for her extra special service. Is he just cheap, or had he been under the assumption that the sight of his naked 62-year-old body had filled her with instant non-mercenary lust, and thus her asking for money afterwards wounded his amour-propre? DSK’s worldview of female motivations sometimes seems learned from 1970s Penthouse letters to the editor, the ones that usually began: “I belong to a fraternity at a small Midwestern liberal arts college, and I’d never believed Penthouse’s letters-to-the-editor until one night when I ordered a pizza delivered and …”

Whether this is kinder than Sailer’s previous comparison, which invoked the name of Pepé Le Pew, is left as an exercise for the student.

Well, maybe half the public, anyway.

InStyle has a tutorial on How to Walk in Heels. It’s a topic that’s been covered here before, but what I find interesting about it is about four-fifths of the way through, where they suggest you wear something else once in a while:

Footwear brands like Fit Flop, Reebok and Skechers claim that the specialized midsoles in their toning shoes strengthen leg muscles and improve posture, which could help prevent heel-related injuries.

Of course, if you always wear Fit Flops or Reeboks or Skechers, you’ll never have heel-related injuries, unless you back into a pothole or something, but hey, I’m not the fashion expert around here.

This is singer/songwriter/surfer (yes!) Tristan Prettyman, heading who knows where:

Now the last time I brought her name up, I tossed in her wondrous little breakup song “Madly,” which I still think is great. At the time, she’d just gotten engaged to singer Jason Mraz; it appears that now they’ve broken up, which leaves me wondering if the inclusion of “Madly” on the soundtrack to He’s Just Not That Into You was somehow sadly prophetic.

I should know. It took me nearly ten years to get mine.

So I must congratulate Stacy and Smitty and wombat-socho and a cast of bazillions, for putting The Other McCain over the seven-million mark. And since I’ve gotten a fair amount of traffic from TOM, I hope they keep on rolling up the numbers.

Laura contemplates the origin of the town in which she lives:

I’d like to know what insane settler walked through here centuries ago and thought “Damn! This godforsaken place is so hot and humid and has such massive, disgusting bugs, I think I’ll build a town here!”

I can tell her why the insane settlers landed in my town: the government was giving away Free Land. (How the government obtained said land, of course, was not mentioned anywhere in the prospectus.)

So I did the WordPress 3.2 installs yesterday, and for some reason I probably don’t want to know, the All! New! Dashboard! informed me that my browser (Firefox 3.6.18, if you must know) was in desperate need of being upgraded.

The coders were at least prescient enough to sneak a small “Dismiss” link into the box, though they could have saved three bytes by simply calling it “FOAD.” It was a closer match to my attitude, anyway.

Especially since my antipathy toward DST is on the record and all:

Or, as the lovely Goldie Hawn once said on Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In, “I wish they’d move Christmas to July, when the stores aren’t so crowded.”

(Poached from Rand Simberg.)

It’s been a long time since we had any Maureen Dowd-related material here, but fortunately for me and my need to fill this space, the blogger known as Half Sigma, who has been reviewing the life stories of New York Times scribes of late, kicked off a discussion with this observation:

Yet despite her success, I sense in her a lack of happiness with her life that doesn’t occur with the daughters of more elite parents. The daughters of the elite somehow manage to get married and have children despite pursuing their careers. In contrast, Maureen’s writings seem to reek of bitterness about being an old maid. So even though she appears to be successful, she compares herself to the children of the elite whom she works with and somehow she feels they have something she’s missing. But instead of blaming the elites or her prole parents for her unhappiness, she blames men.

In case you missed it, I offered some thoughts on Are Men Necessary? here.

Half Sigma’s commenter “blah” suggests:

She probably played the field too long in her youth and she was most likely holding out for a rich alpha male. Unfortunately, that didn’t pan out. So she complains about men who are intimidated by her (i.e. make less than her) and she snickers about the extra-marital affairs of rich alpha males in her columns. While she hates conservatives, I would wager she probably hates rich alpha males even more. This is where I disagree with HS. MoDo isn’t unhappy because she’s a striver but rather because she made some really foolish decisions in her dating life when she was at her peak in attractiveness. This woman was so unrealistic in her outlook that she thought she could land someone like Don Draper before she was a household name. And of course, when she became a household name, she was too old.

The trouble with landing someone like Don Draper, of course, is the risk of landing Don Draper.

I could say something here like “She’s only fifty-nine,” but that might seem somewhat self-serving.

Like there’s a chance I’d get away with that line:

“A well-read pair of pumps,” says Anthropologie of these “Bookbinder Heels,” which practically demand that you check out the detailing on the, um, spine. It says, incidentally, “VOL XII,” which is no indication of size. (Doesn’t come in a twelve. Eleven, yes.) Which means that if you really wanted your shoe size emblazoned on your heel, you’d still have to wear your bowling shoes, which almost certainly don’t have a 3¾-inch heel or any sort of platform, and probably don’t cost $168 either.

(Via this Nancy Friedman tweet.)

When I was a kid, I never quite understood all 64 colors in the big Crayola box: what the hell was “sienna,” and why was it burnt? I eventually figured all that stuff out. I finally learned how to do those pesky RGB color codes that screw up the Web for us. (In case you were wondering, the color bars off to the sides are #330000.) Six times out of ten, I can even comprehend an OPI nail color.

But these new paints throw me for a loop:

In a redoubled effort to capture consumers’ attention in the sputtering economic recovery, some paint companies are hoping to distinguish their brands with names that tell a story, summon a memory or evoke an emotion — even a dark one — as long as they result in a sale.

What they do not do is reveal the color.

For instance:

Valspar, which once featured Apricot 1 (all the way up to Apricot 6), now offers Weekend in the Country, a name that might put you in mind of an idyllic getaway or a Stephen Sondheim tune but that will not convey a specific hue. (For the record, it is the color of mud; perhaps not such a great weekend after all.)

On the other hand, mud rooms are trendy these days.

Farrow & Ball’s “Dead Salmon” — “dead” apparently means something like “matte” — has its own modest charm.

Not that I should talk, of course, since my own walls, unrepainted these eight years, are now something like Free Clinic White.

(Via Pop Culture Junk Mail.)

Rather a lot of automakers — conspicuous by its absence was General Motors — have written to Rep. James Sensenbrenner, R-WI, vice chairman of the House Committee on Science, Space and Technology, supporting his plan to block the sale of E15, which EPA has approved only for vehicles 2001 and newer; the manufacturers say they may void warranties on cars using E15.

Unsurprisingly, corn-belt legislators are miffed by this sort of thing, with, for instance, Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA) grumbling about “overwhelming scientific evidence,” no small amount of which is deposited to his account each and every year.

Dumbest comment, however, emanated from easily-bought — just ask the President — Sen. Ben Nelson (D-NE), who advised against buying a car from one of these automakers: “I’d just buy a different car.”

Sure, Ben. Wait a few weeks and Archer Daniels Midland will buy one for you. Until they offer to buy one for me, though, you can take your precious ethanol and give yourself a Scientific Duodenal Cleansing. I’m sure you can get Chuck Grassley to hold the nozzle.

While Clark Matthews, whose A/C has been on the fritz, can easily justify referring to this place as “The Gates of Hell,” I must point out here that we got nothing on the PHX:

Years ago, I had to stay in Phoenix for a week during July. The good news was that they were practically giving hotel rooms away. The bad news was that there was a reason for that: no one who wasn’t forced to be there at that time of year would ever willingly choose to go.

When I made the reservation, I asked the clerk what time the weather cooled off somewhat. His answer was, “Around Thanksgiving.”

This week in Phoenix: highs around 105-110, lows in the upper 80s. Last Thanksgiving in Oklahoma City: high 43, low 28, a trace of snowfall.

Some of the real-world financial aspects of publishing for the Kindle, from Rob O’Hara:

Amazon advertises that authors keep 70% of the proceeds from each eBook sale, but that only applies to books priced at $2.99 and above. For us 99-cent bottom feeders, it’s 35%. That means for each $0.99 electronic copy of Commodork I sell through Amazon, I only make 34 cents. Combine that with the fact that Paypal charges .35 per transaction, and you can quickly see I’m not exactly rolling in the dough on this endeavor. All I can do is “pray Lord Vader doesn’t alter the deal further.”

Accordingly, he’s raising the price of the Kindle version to $2.99, while simultaneously, he’s cutting the price of a non-DRMed PDF version from his Web site from $4.99 to $2.99, which leads to some musing on how to deal with aggrieved buyers who paid the higher price:

Option #4: Contact all the people that just bought Commodork for $0.99 on Amazon and ask them to Paypal $2 to the people that paid me $4.99 for the book.

For the record, I have Commodork in its actual dead-tree edition. Cost me something like $20.

This week, Andrew Ian Dodge is proud to present a “Rumbling” Carnival of the Vanities, the 429th in the series.

Speaking of rumbling, this car did its share:

This is, of course, the semi-legendary Boss Mustang 429, which wasn’t as gosh-darn fast as everyone believed, mainly because Ford built this engine for NASCAR and had to sell at least 500 copies of it to get it approved, but the darn thing wouldn’t fit very well in the ‘Stang’s nose, meaning the intake and exhaust it got were unduly restrictive. Damn laws of physics. (Picture borrowed from TopSpeed.com.)