Presumably you’ve read the book review; now here’s what it didn’t say.

Our favorite Dutiful Xer tagged me for a meme, and I haven’t done one in a while, so why the heck not? We reserve the right to stretch any definition to fit the available material (and to play hell with pronoun agreement), of course.

My Most Beautiful Post: You are —->here [2 January 2005].

[T]he past never goes away. We have a path, a timeline, from which we do not deviate, but so does everything else. What we see as the present is simply the intersection of all those timelines: our own, those of our friends and families, the homes in which we live, the forests that were supplanted by the cities that now contain most of those homes.

My Most Popular Post: No doubt you’ve noticed this yourself [11 May 2009]. (Instalanched to the tune of 13,000-plus that day.)

My Most Controversial Post: A penalty box for two [9 June 2009]. (38 comments!)

This suggests that we’re not going to find much more fuel economy in future vehicles, unless the Obamanauts find a reliable source of liquid unicorn scat or something, and that in a world with its priorities in order, Henry Waxman would be forced to give up his limo for the back seat of a ’75 Civic.

My Most Helpful Post: However implausible it may seem [29 November 2010].

So I slid the battery out of its slot and into a Ziploc bag, and set it in the freezer for fourteen hours. I gave it three hours to warm back up, shoved it back into the machine, and plugged it in; the trusty orange Charging light came on. When the orange light turned to green, I disconnected the power cord and booted up the machine. After four minutes, I checked the power meter: 97 percent.

A Post I Didn’t Think Got the Attention It Deserved: Domo arigato, mystery motto [23 September 2011]. (Not only did it call for the simplest possible responses, the title was one of my best. Or worst.)

The Post I’m Most Proud Of: At the very edge of civilization [13 July 2004].

I don’t believe for a moment that having a population of ten per square mile, as North Dakota does, is some sort of tragedy. (Oklahoma has around fifty; factor out the two largest metro areas and the figure drops into the twenties, with Lawton, about the same size as Fargo, as the largest remaining city.) Maybe it’s inevitable that a place called the Peace Garden State is going to be rather sparsely populated. But I figure that the people who live here are ingenious enough to keep themselves afloat; after all, they manage to get by without voter registration just fine, and this is the sort of independent streak that usually means a finely-tuned survival instinct.

A Post Whose Success Surprised Me: Semi-nice try [20 August 2011]. (A simple reprint of a piece of comment spam, it got 13 comments in less than five and a half hours.)

Feel free to swipe the concept if you’re so inclined.

One of the snarkmeisters who’s affected me greatly over the years is the mysterious “Ed.” who responds to letters in Car and Driver. (How many years? Thirty-three, if I’ve counted correctly.) This one from November ’11 sent me into a protracted giggle fit. First, the aggrieved reader:

Geez, [Eddie] Alterman. Do you have to use such big words [Editor's Letter, August 2011]? Most of us aren’t lexicographers.

Came back the reply:

After looking up “lexicographer,” I looked up “irony,” and there was a picture of me looking up “lexicographer” — Ed.

You can’t get a whole lot more meta than that.

(For some reason, this particular column of Alterman’s isn’t on the C/D Web site, though I will tell you that it contains such terms as “somatic” and “self-hagiography.”)

One of the problems with the so-called Universal Service Fund is its very name: if it’s “universal,” it will accommodate almost anything. The FCC has pretty much admitted it:

“Congress did not envision that services supported by universal service would remain static,” said FCC chairman Kevin J. Martin [in 2007]. “Instead, it views universal service as an evolving level of communications services. A modern and high-quality communications infrastructure is essential to ensure that all Americans, including those residing in rural communities, have access to the economic, educational and healthcare opportunities available on the network.”

Martin has since left the FCC, but there’s no reason to think that the Commission has changed its tune — or that state and local officials will dance to another.

The following rumor — and for now, that’s all it is — came in early this morning:

Just heard the OK Corporations [sic] Commission is planning to levy a new $47 million tax on all cell phone and land line users this Tuesday. These are all elected Republicans trying to do this without any public scrutiny. They are going to double the taxes we pay to the universal service fund…a fund as I understand it created before cell phones were popular meant to support landlines. Republicans imposing $47 million in new taxes to support land lines!?

Of course, if the Universal Service Fund is “evolving” — well, you can see where this might be going. And Republicans aren’t exactly tax-averse when they’re holding the purse strings.

Interestingly, as of this writing, the OCC Web site has meetings and agendas posted through Monday, though nothing for Tuesday.

I am currently billed for both Federal and Oklahoma “universal service fees”, as follows:

• Landline: federal, 76 cents, state, $1.30.
• Wireless: federal, 73 cents, state, 54 cents.

We’ll see what happens. The original rumor came in as a comment, and was attached to this post after the fact. I note that the same email address shows up in several comments on this subject at other sites, and that in this case, it was using a Belgian IP.

Software should do its job and keep its trap shut:

Who’s the allegedly empty-headed beauty? Her name is Elena Alexandra Apostoleanu, but fans of Romanian pop stars know her as “Inna.” She’s not quite twenty-five, and she looks something like this:

And for the curious, here’s her 2010 single “10 Minutes”.

(First photo found at Poorly Dressed; second photo by T. Spark.)

“No man is an island,” said John Donne, but there are entirely too many times when I feel like a clod washed away by the sea: at the very least, my connection to the mainland seems tenuous.

And a lot of the bridges seem to be one-way only:

It feels like all I have to offer is nice and helpful. If you need your taxes done, or need something from the store, or a deck built, or someone to listen to you tell all your tales of woe, or need a mural painted in your living room, I will do that for you at no charge. I’m happy to do it, excited for a connection, excited that I might have actually made a friend. But I hope you’ll like me in exchange for my efforts, because it sometimes feels like that’s all I’ve got.

“Nice and helpful” is nowhere nearly as common as we’d like it to be.

Still, it’s not unusual to fear solitude: as Donne said, “it is a torment that is not threatened in hell itself.” I flit back and forth between embracing it and cursing it. I settle into my various routines, and sometimes they’re enough, but sometimes the shore seems awfully far away.

I shouldn’t have to remind you of this by now, but it’s October again, and therefore it’s time for the Boobie-Thon. (They actually started late on the 30th of September, but surely no one has a problem with that.)

On the other hand, if you’ve read this far and are thinking “WTF”?, here’s how it all came about and what it’s for, except that where it says “raised over $17,000,” you’ll want to read “raised over $74,000.” I’ve been promoting it on a regular basis for several years, and I’ve also kicked in some small fraction of the fundage, which explains the presence of the graphic. (And the current title seems a bit less unsubtle than the one I was planning to use: “Save the Racks!”)

(Previous announcements: 2010, 2009, 2008, 2007, 2006.)

Put a sock in it, Vader. This isn’t just any ’77 Toyota Celica:

In late 1977, this very car — passengers not included — was apparently given away in some national sweepstakes, and no one’s seen it since:

The Star Wars Celica was designed by Delphi Auto Design in Costa Mesa, California, and awarded sometime after the end of 1977, probably in January 1978. While the sweepstakes were a joint venture hosted by Toyota and Twentieth Century Fox, the awarding dealership remains a mystery, as does the identity of the winner and the vehicle’s VIN number.

There doesn’t seem to be a whole lot of customization here: the paint job, of course, a modest body kit, spiffier-than-stock wheels and tires, and a nice hole in the roof for bulls-eyeing womp rats, but apparently it’s the same trusty old 20R four with a two-barrel, presumably bolted to Toyota’s five-speed stick. (Very few of these cars were fitted with the three-speed automatic; mine certainly wasn’t.) Autoblog suggests it met its end on the Kessel Run, but its fate, I fear, is likely more mundane: an attack by the dreaded tinworm, which in those days chewed through Japanese sheetmetal like teenagers through Doritos, followed by a trip to the garbage compactor.

(My own Celica history here.)

The hardest thing for some of us to get our minds around has been that there exists no Law of Conservation of Equity: if it’s reduced at Point A, there is no Point B at which it must therefore increase. There’s still a lot of it out there — $6.2 trillion, said the Federal Reserve at the end of June — but six years ago there was over $13 trillion. That’s one hell of a vanishing act.

Still, not everybody is underwater yet:

Roughly one of every three homes is mortgage-free, according to federal and industry estimates.

Among owners who have mortgages, according to CoreLogic, 48.5 percent of them have at least 25 percent equity stakes in their properties. Roughly a quarter of owners with mortgages — 24.6 percent — have more than 50 percent equity.

At the other end of the spectrum, 22.5 percent of owners are in negative equity positions, burdened with houses worth less than their mortgage balances.

According to the county assessor, the value of the palatial estate at Surlywood dropped by a percentage point this year, but the amount due on the mortgage went down more than that, so technically my equity position has improved by a smidgen: about 27 percent, putting me pretty close to the 50th percentile. Property-tax rates won’t be released until later this month, but I anticipate about a 1-percent increase — which would leave my tax bill for this year at pretty much where it was last year. Then again, my mad prediction skillz have been fairly questionable of late.

Former Microsoft wiseguy Nathan Myhrvold dabbles in Technological Oenophilia:

Wine lovers have known for centuries that decanting wine before serving it often improves its flavor. Whatever the dominant process, the traditional decanter is a rather pathetic tool to accomplish it. A few years ago, I found I could get much better results by using an ordinary kitchen blender. I just pour the wine in, frappé away at the highest power setting for 30 to 60 seconds, and then allow the froth to subside (which happens quickly) before serving. I call it “hyperdecanting.”

Myhrvold says it “almost invariably” improves red wines; white wines don’t generally accumulate much sediment, unless they’re allowed to get too cold.

(Via TYWKIWDBI.)

Probably my favorite U2 song is “I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For,” which may be the theme song for the thousand or so people who come to this site every week looking for something sort of specific, and which should definitely be sung by the ten or so who land on this page by dint of having provided above-average snark potential.

two hearts synchronizing:  Amazingly, it doesn’t require any additional equipment.

old backwater:  They don’t seem to be making any new backwaters — at least, not deliberately.

spendophobia:  A disease, immunity to which is acquired by election to Congress.

deer bouncing off car into another car:  Only a select few deer are chosen for kamikaze duty. They are much to be feared.

edible footwear:  Recommended for all of you who suffer from foot-in-mouth syndrome.

which ones beavis:  At a certain metaphysical level, it really doesn’t matter.

jayne mansfield removed from the car:  Which is a shame, considering what it took to get her installed in the first place.

rebecca black costume:  Not this year. Halloween is on a Monday, not a Friday.

“invisible woman” seduce:  Good luck with that. How can you get to second base if you can’t find it?

chipmunk chewing through weather stripping:  And now you know why David Seville froze to death.

zoey deschanel fat knees:  Well, you know, nobody’s perfect, not even Zooey.

dusthbry:  In Elizabethan times, an unopenable cupboard.

Severian admits to never having heard of Vampire Weekend, which prompts an analysis from Gagdad Bob:

In hindsight, I think rock died in about 1975. Since then there have been some good albums and artists, but nothing truly novel, just iterations of settled forms and recycling of various genres. One might even say that the punk movement, which began in the mid-1970s, signified the full circle, i.e., returning to the primitive and unadorned roots of primeval rock. Some of the latter was great — e.g. London Calling — but it was nevertheless impossible to return to the spontaneous, artless and unself-conscious innocence of 1955, just as it will always be impossible for the jazz artist to return to the days of Louis Armstrong in 1926, when he was inventing the jazz vocabulary. One man’s open discovery becomes another’s closed dogma.

I was wanting to call Bob out on this one when it occurred to me that I couldn’t think of a post-’75 genre, save punk, that wasn’t at least somewhat derivative, and that pretty much all my recent favorite singles were in some ways throwbacks to earlier days. (You can’t tell me that if Ruth Brown were still around, she wouldn’t have a go at “Rolling in the Deep.”)

So rock just died, and Suzie went and left Elton for some other guy, so to speak. And while the Clash deserve their spot in the Pantheon, they managed to incorporate so many pre-punk influences that I’m tempted to declare the Great Divide to have occurred, not with London Calling, but with Never Mind the Bollocks, Here’s the Sex Pistols. No such discontinuity arises with Vampire Weekend, unless you’re a fan of the Oxford comma.

Received within seconds of one another, from three literally consecutive IPs:

Can I simply say what a aid to seek out someone who actually knows what theyre speaking about on the internet. You definitely know methods to carry a problem to light and make it important. More people must learn this and understand this aspect of the story. I cant consider youre no more fashionable because you definitely have the gift. ["Bernetta Crivelli," 74.221.208.35]

I?d must examine with you here. Which isn’t one thing I often do! I take pleasure in reading a post that can make individuals think. Also, thanks for allowing me to remark! ["Michel Galayda," 74.221.208.36]

Can I just say what a reduction to find someone who actually knows what theyre speaking about on the internet. You positively know tips on how to carry an issue to light and make it important. Extra folks have to read this and understand this aspect of the story. I cant imagine youre no more well-liked because you positively have the gift. ["Trent Yauck," 74.221.208.37]

All these figmentary Hirudinea were hyping the same URL, which will of course be ignored here.

Glenn Reynolds proposes a Constitutional amendment:

Any person, having been elected to the office of United States senator, shall be forever ineligible to be elected to the office of president of the United States. The purpose of this amendment isn’t so much to protect the presidency, as to protect the Senate. Very few senators ever become president, but of the 100 people serving in the Senate at any given time, probably about 95 think they’ve got a shot. This causes them to treat their Senate service as a potential steppingstone, rather than an end in itself. Ban senators from higher office and you encourage them to focus on their jobs. Plus, a Senate that couldn’t serve as a steppingstone might attract a better caliber of senator.

I dunno. Harry Reid seems to have no further ambition, and he’s about as small-caliber (or large-bore, if you’re thinking shotguns) as they come.

I see one potential sticking-point: the existing senators, at least the 95 who covet the White House, aren’t going to go for this unless it’s written specifically to exclude anyone in office at the time of ratification. (Once a greedy pygmy, always a greedy pygmy.)

The more arguable point, though, is whether this would have more of a salutary effect than simply repealing the 17th Amendment and returning the selection process to the states. Opinions differ on the exact benefits of getting away from direct election of senators, though one of them, at least to me, is never again finding myself in a crowd of people and thinking “Christ, some of these people actually voted for Jim Inhofe.”

News Item: Occupy Wall Street movement issues proposed list of demands.

Next Top Ten Demands of Occupy Wall Street movement:

10. Unemployment benefits extended to 99 years
9. New logo for Bank of AmeriKKKa
8. Tim Tebow off television forever
7. Selective Service reactivated to select dates for Janeane Garofalo
6. Government to ration meat, Michael Moore to receive first batch of ration coupons
5. Investment bank to be renamed “Goldman Sucks”
4. Jersey Shore recast with progressives, plus Snooki
3. Global Temperature Saving enacted, thermometers to be set back 5 degrees in March, forward again in November
2. Double Rainbow Guy to be named Secretary of something
1. More cowbell!

The movement reserves the right to change its mind without notice.

How long has it been since you had a bright, shiny new Zooeypalooza?

Well, that’s too long:

Clicking on any section produces a certain amount of rebigulation.

Previous Paloozas: ZP 1, ZP 2, ZP 3, ZP 4, ZP 5, ZP 6, ZP 7, ZP 8, ZP 9, ZP 10, ZP 11.

Robert Stacy McCain weeps over his lack of attention from the Instant Man:

Something has gone drastically wrong, and I can’t figure out what it is. About a month ago, as Wombat noted in his Aug. 28 FMJRA round-up, we got no fewer than six Instalanches in the span of a single week. There are bloggers who’ve worked for years without getting a ‘Lanche, and so we may have exhausted our karmic quota of linky-love that week, which would explain the 17% decline of traffic from August to September.

At my current rate of ‘Lancheration, I should get my sixth somewhere around 2015.

Then again, I avoid paying too much attention to the meter, mostly because (1) it’s too depressing and (2) it’s not like Susannah Breslin is reading me or anything. I will, however, point out this weird fact from my own statistics: since the first of the year, feed subscribers here are up by 30-40 percent, yet SiteMeter shows only a modest 10-percent gain. Then again, the JavaScript used by SiteMeter doesn’t count anyone’s feed reader unless they actually come back to the site.

McCain, I suspect, were he to find similar results at his place, would not be mollified, and would move heaven and earth to figure out a way to make it possible to get feed subscribers to hit the freaking tip jar.

Aggrieved dork goes into paroxysm:

Is it illegal for a car dealership to sell you a used car with a flat spare tire?

i have a 2000 dodge intrepid and the tire blew and went to put on the spare tire and it was flat lucky for me i was close to home but was wondering is this legal?

Later:

it was bought a few months ago and this was the first time need the spare since all the tires were fine

So he’d had the car for “a few months,” and it never occurred to him to look in the trunk?

I really hope he sues. Few things in life are quite so enjoyable as someone being laughed out of a courtroom.

Number One Grandson has a Facebook account, which does not bother me greatly: I mean, he’s almost twelve, fercryingoutloud. I’ve read blogs by people with ages barely into double digits, without thinking Dark Thoughts or anything. What I wasn’t expecting, though, was that he’d be listing himself as “In a relationship.”

I duly gave my surprise an airing on my own Wall, which drew this remark from his mother: “I saw that and about passed out.”

As someone once said, “If Booth Tarkington had written Seventeen today, he’d have had to call it Twelve.” God only knows what would have happened to Penrod.

Few things are quite as disconcerting as happening upon your doctor at the supermarket. Fortunately, my basket was nearly empty at the time, else I might have had to endure something like this:

Caving to my doctor’s incessant prodding to partake of healthier fare containing rather large amounts of high fiber and less potables, I began a stout regimen of bran, greens and moderate sobriety.

An hour after promising to attempt a healthier lifestyle just to shut his yammering pie hole, I made a tedious, label reading trip through the store and loaded the pantry with bran flakes, assorted brown grains and other unappetizing foodstuffs I had absolutely no desire to eat.

The results were pretty much what you’d expect:

How in the hell can any medical professional recommend such a gruesome diet that would limit most sentient people to a solitary life compatible with isolated penal confinement or eating grubs in some remote island cave? You simply can’t go out in public after indulging in this bit of healthful idiocy.

Well, you can, but you have to be able to deftly deflect any and all attention that might be paid to your overactive butt trumpet. It helps to work in an unpleasant industrial environment, where such ructions scarcely will be noticed.

I admit that there are times when you might not want to eat off my kitchen floor. Then again, it’s probably no worse than your damn desk:

Dirty office desks are harbouring germs which can quickly spread among staff as firms are braced for an outbreak of sickness absence through colds and flu, a new report said.

A study of desks by office supplies firm Viking in hundreds of offices across the country found poor levels of hygiene.

Germs were found in almost two-thirds of computer keyboards, while some even had mould growing underneath.

The level of contamination seems to vary with the occupation of the occupant:

Lawyers, accountants and computer workers were said to be the most unhygienic office workers in the country, while social workers were more likely to have mouldy food on their desks.

This story comes from Britain, but I have no reason to think things are any more sanitary on this side of the pond, though I’m quite sure neither of my keyboards have developed any mold despite their advanced age. My IBM Model M at home is 21 years old today, so maybe I’ll buy it a drink. Alcohol has (vaguely) disinfectant properties, you know.

(Via the ever-spotless neo-neocon.)

And then her lifeline unfriended her.

(Via Failbook.)

And what happens when there’s no rain? Well, it’s still saved, and it’s not doing anything:

Enjoy it while it lasts. I don’t have any vintage clothing (unless you count those few things from the ’80s that I keep hanging on to) but I have a bad habit of “saving” favorite garments — not wearing them “too often” so they won’t wear out. But of course that’s silly. Whether I wear them until they wear out or they hang in the closet, or sit in a drawer, I have the same amount of time to enjoy them. The time they spend in the closet or in a drawer is time they are not being enjoyed.

The antithesis of this, of course, is wearing the same thing so often that everyone gets totally sick of it and never ever wants to see it again. Ask Marge Simpson, who spent the better part of an episode in the same Chanel.

I have elsewhere described my wardrobe (for values of “wardrobe” equal to 1) as “cheap imitation Dockers and a pocket T.” There’s really no reason to save that stuff for special occasions. Not that I anticipate any special occasions anytime soon.

Rhapsody has announced plans to acquire Napster, and I suppose the real question here is “Napster’s still around?”

Best Buy, which actually did own Napster, will retain a nominal equity stake, but Rhapsody will have all the subscribers and the IP. Says Rhapsody President Jon Irwin:

“This is a ‘go big or go home’ business, so our focus is on sustainably growing the company,” said Irwin. “We’re excited to welcome Napster music fans to the best on-demand music experience anywhere. Our new members will have more places to connect to the music they love and to discover new favorites, guided by Rhapsody’s rockstar editorial team and the tastes of other Rhapsody members via our innovative social features.”

Farker “Fark Me to Tears” quipped: “Rhapsody isn’t actually going to pay anything for Napster. They’re just going to download a copy of it.”

There are times when I just can’t figure out Consumer Reports.

In November, there’s a sidebar in the Cars section that says the following:

We now recommend the [Chevrolet] Volt plug-in hybrid after new data from our 2011 Annual Auto Survey shows it earned much better than average reliability. Very few of the 116 Volt respondents had any serious problems in the first few months of ownership.

Which seems reasonable to me. All the major hybrids — Toyota, Honda, Ford — are showing better-than-decent reliability figures, perhaps because of the extra development time that goes into hybrid design: you’ve got to have pretty tight tolerances, or it won’t work at all. If the sample size seems small, well, there are only a couple of thousand Volts out there; it’s at least as statistically valid as responses on, say, 15,000 Camrys. (If you own a Porsche, your mileage may vary.)

In the CR road tests, the Volt scored an okay, if not inspiring, 67, about four points behind the baby Lexus (CT200h) hybrid.

None of this would pose a problem except that in the same issue, they test a Hyundai Sonata Hybrid, their sample of which proved to be deeply flawed: it scored, they said, “too low to recommend.” The Sonata rolled up a score of 69, two points above the Volt.

Now it was my understanding that CR’s reliability ratings and road-test scores had nothing to do with one another. The criteria for Recommended:

“… did well in our road tests, had average or better reliability in our subscriber survey, and performed at least adequately if included in government or insurance-industry safety tests.”

The safety details for the Sonata Hybrid, as given, look fine to me, and better than anything else tested in that issue. Something here doesn’t add up.

Megan McArdle, on kitchen fads and fashion:

My understanding of the luxury cycle is that as soon as everyone can afford a decent replica of high-priced items, the replicated qualities become outré. By that metric, stainless steel and granite have to be on their way out; the only thing more ubiquitous in the American kitchen is the George Foreman grill.

On the other hand, maybe in 1948 I’d have been saying that wall-mounted cabinets were a passing fad.

I dunno. I wasn’t around in 1948, when they built this house I live in, but I suspect that even then, hanging cabinets on the wall just seemed like a sensible space-utilization practice. Of course, the one distinctly non-period feature of the kitchen — a section of wall between kitchen and living room now has a ginormous rectangular cutout, and a breakfast bar (with track lighting!) has been installed therein — probably made no sense to anyone but a previous owner. And, of course, me.

Truth be told, if I were actually looking for another house, I’d ring up Trini and ask her to evaluate kitchens for me. She’s good at that.

Oh, and granite countertops release radon.

Disclosure: I own a George Foreman grill. Also, Firefox 3.6.23 spell check doesn’t bat an eye at “ginormous,” but frowns at “countertops.”

The very first thing that occurred to me upon hearing that Steve Jobs was gone was this: “If Aldous Huxley had waited eight or nine decades, he could have set Brave New World in the year 632 A.S.: After Steve.”

“Surely you’re not comparing Steve Jobs to Henry Ford,” I hear you say. [Insert Leslie Nielsen witticism here.] I am doing exactly that. If Ford put cars on America’s roads, Jobs put buds on America’s ears. And you can’t get much more Fordish than this: you can get any color of earbuds you want, as long as it’s white.

Or I could point out that the Ford Motor Company is Detroit’s #2 automaker, and that Mac OS, whatever version it’s in right this minute, outsells every other desktop/laptop operating system but one.

But I keep coming back to that phrase “insanely great.” The particular genius of Steve Jobs, I think, is that he knew if something was great enough, you could afford to go a little insane. In a world full of risk avoiders and me-too products and Epsilon-Minus Semi-Moron product planners, Apple under Steve Jobs wasn’t afraid to say “Bring ‘em on.” We can only hope that Apple after Steve Jobs will do the same.

Deborah Harkness recommended this in a tweet, and I liked it enough to pass it on.

Vienna Teng, thirty-three, graduated from Stanford and worked as a software engineer for Cisco before deciding to move into music full-time; this is from her album Waking Hour. (Words can be had from her Web site.) I think this one’s a keeper.

Update: For some reason, this one has decided to autostart. I’ve killed the embed. You can watch it here.

Further update: I’ve gone back to the old-style embed code. Let’s see if it behaves any better.

Last month, some melonfarming Cornhusker tried to pull a fast one, using a number that properly belonged in my wallet. The bank caught it quickly enough, and killed off the compromised card, though I didn’t find it out until the weekend. (What can I say? My work schedule for the last several years has been fundamentally incompatible with bankers’ hours.) At the time, I noted that I had an automatic payment due that weekend, which would fail. A call to the merchant the following Monday took care of that.

In fact, so far everyone has handled this with dispatch, except for T-Mobile, which had just gotten paid the preceding Thursday. The next week, I signed into their Web site and made the appropriate changes, which were acknowledged by a text message.

This month’s bill is due Monday the 10th. Yesterday, which was the 5th, the Big T derped out four texts, including two within a span of 45 seconds, complaining that they could not get their money, dammit. (Normally they collect on the 8th.) I was sufficiently miffed to waltz my way into an actual T-Mobile store and cancel the autopay forthwith. (“Fifthwith, even,” as Snagglepuss might say.) I noted with grim satisfaction that their air conditioning had failed: evidently the impending arrival of the Death Star has taken its toll on the physical plant.

There are three annual payments to deal with. One of them is bound to fail: SiteMeter, because it always does. Fortunately, David’s used to my whining by now. The surfer dudes who host this Web site haven’t tried to collect any money from me of late — last month, my balance was a startling $0.01 — but I’m not worried about them. That leaves one more, and one more potential story. We shall see. Exit, stage left.

By now, we’re used to seeing what a computer looks like when it reboots. (Some of us are, um, more than used to it.) We are not, however, used to seeing it in the middle of the arena in Incredible Hulk-O-Vision:

(Swiped from Dan Steinberg’s D.C. Sports Bog, a WaPo joint.)

Flaming Lips frontman Wayne Coyne is always quotable, and this bit from the Gazette is more so than average:

“Wayne, I think we’re gonna die,’” [Darren] King told Wayne Coyne, the Lips’ ever-optimistic front man, who assured him, “Oh, no, no, no. We’ll just get paralyzed.”

Darren King is drummer for Mutemath, who obviously did not perish in that Tulsa storm, and who will be appearing Friday at the Conservatory. And by now they’re probably sick of “Typical,” but they’ll play it anyway.

Oklahoma City wants a new police HQ/municipal court — no surprise there, the old one is way past its prime — and one proposed scheme to pay for it is to jack up the court costs for speeding tickets:

Speeding tickets have a lower court cost associated with them than other moving violations, and the cost hasn’t risen in eight years… The bump by $11 would bring in an extra $500,000 a year and save the city interest payments that would be associated with some of the other payment options.

Not that I have a problem with this, particularly, inasmuch as the amount they’ve made from my (lack of) moving violations in the past three decades is right at $0, but half a million dollars from an eleven-buck bump? Is it possible that the city hands out 45,000 speeding tickets a year?

“As it turned out, Lou Gehrig died of Lou Gehrig’s disease. What are the chances of that?”

This one-liner has been kicking around in the back of my head for several decades now. I seem to remember hearing it in George Carlin’s voice. Then again, “Weird Al” Yankovic has warned against misattribution of this sort, so I’m not going to declare it a Carlinism.

And I wouldn’t bring it up here except for Lynn’s piece about Nellie Melba:

She was highly regarded in her day and now she’s only remembered as the name of a dessert, and hardly anyone knows why it’s named that. But, on the other hand, there are worse ways that one’s name can go down in history. As the name of a deadly disease, is the first thing that comes to mind.

John Montagu, fourth earl of Sandwich, was not available for comment; I suspect he may have been out to lunch.

And besides, there’s at least the possibility that Lou Gehrig might actually have died of something else, though there’s really no way to know for sure.

Tiffani Azani writes in Business 2 Community:

I think Rebecca Black has well established that her current fame is more important than whatever else should happen in the future. But that begs the question, will her fame actually last? And in 20 years, when she looks back on her teenage fame, how will she feel? Her teenage brain has chosen fame over pride, which is understandable for someone in their youth. However, I doubt that she will feel the same, in five, ten, twenty, or even fifty years. Like many one-hit wonders before her, people will forget and she will have a minimal level of fame.

Will we still need her, will we still feed her, when she’s sixty-four? Hard to say. However, rather a lot of one-hit wonders have managed to sustain lengthy careers under the radar. Bruce Channel, who gave us the iconic “Hey! Baby,” used to quip at his live performances: “And now, I’d like to do a medley of my hit.” He’s still singing it.

There is, of course, the obligatory Future Projection:

Just imagine what archaeologists would think in three hundred years if they uncovered a video from the 21st Century, and instead of some incredibly talented artist like Yo-Yo Ma, they found a video of Rebecca Black instead?

But who the hell knows? In 2311, “music” may consist of the amplified resonance obtained by cutting bosons in two with nanochainsaws. They may not know Yo-Yo Ma from yo’ mama.

Dropped into the Akismet queue yesterday:

You must master the artwork and technology of traffic for your website. Is the web site without site visitors is like having an ice cream store within the desert, located one hundred km from the nearest highway. It has the most efficient ice cream on this planet, but when anyone enters your retailer, you are going to be defeated.

About three hours later, from the same IP:

Personally, I will positioned the squeeze on my web site and use it to get an inventory that I will marketplace many times.

I hate it when my squeeze is unpositioned.

Bill Quick’s take on campaign debates is pretty much the same as mine:

Actually, if it were up to me, I’d ban debates entirely. Too much is at stake to hang a primary nomination on a mis-statement or an unimpressive makeup job.

Or, for that matter, an uninformed, possibly even hostile, moderator.

A lot of candidates complain about not getting their message out. It doesn’t seem to occur to them that these 90-second driblets don’t constitute much of a message. Right now, about the only value I see to the debates is the marked increase in snark I notice in my tweetstream.

Once upon a time, readers of FHM selected Gillian Anderson as the Sexiest Woman in the World. And that time, you’ll want to know, was 1996. How does she look today? (By “today,” I mean “earlier this week on a British talk show.”)

I’d say, certainly better than FHM, which wound up withdrawing from American newsstands in 2006. And besides, when’s the last time I showed you anything this orange?

The passing of Steve Jobs has inspired Stuart Brown and the WordPress gang to assemble a Retro Mac theme, which I have installed on the backup site because — well, why the heck not? (I briefly entertained the idea of dropping it here, but decided against it out of, um, brand-management considerations. Yeah. That’ll work.)

I must point out here that not everyone is inclined to mourn the fellow, who by all accounts was, let us say, a bit difficult. Then again, so am I, to far less effect.

Zooey Deschanel flies with “The Wayward Wind”:

(Snipped from HelloGiggles, in which ZD is a partner.)

Just when I start to think that my approved-by-Andy-Warhol fifteen minutes of fame have expired, they tell me that I’ve been mentioned in a book.

And by “they,” I mean Adam Gurri, who sent this into the stream yesterday:

Having blithered my way through eighteen thousand or so snippets of tweet text so far, I couldn’t possibly identify anything I said which might be of interest to Mr Jarvis, whose book Public Parts: How Sharing in the Digital Age Improves the Way We Work and Live (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2011) was published a couple weeks ago. Mr Gurri, however, could:

It’s referenced on page three, albeit just by the Twitter ID — but then, anyone who looks up that Twitter ID is going to find me. (As regular readers know, I have vanishingly few secrets.)

Of course, this means I’ll have to buy the book, as I did with the two previous books that make some reference to me. And over in the corner, Andy is looking at his watch.