Well, not technically, but hey, I’m not gonna complain.

Cue McCartney and stand back:

You are 19% Russian!

 

Who are you kidding? Just because you took a summer language course in Petersburg doesn’t make you a Russian.

How Russian Are You?
Take More Quizzes

I question this conclusion; at the very least, I should have scored lower than an actual Russian.

This is Morgan Fairchild, your wife, whom you’ve slept with, as she looked this past Saturday night at a Halloween party:

I used to be married to a Texas girl slightly younger than Morgan (she’s 57, Morgan is 61). They hold up (minor adjustments aside) pretty well, don’t you think?

Dr. Weevil reports there is exactly one blog he can’t read at work because it’s “tasteless & offensive.”

I’d like to get a statement to that effect from the management, just to add to my list of Stirring Testimonials. (Heh-heh. I said “testi.”)

This is most likely not the result of my shooting off my mouth, but I am disturbed by it anyway:

It is a sad day in indie town: Actress/singer/New Girl Zooey Deschanel, 31, and Death Cab for Cutie frontman Ben Gibbard, 35, have announced the end of their two-year marriage.

The duo’s split was confirmed to US Weekly by a rep; a source says that the parting is amicable, and involves no third parties.

(Title inverted from here.)

The note from the Harper Valley PTA opened: “Mrs Johnson, you’re wearing your dresses way too high.”

Then again, at least she was wearing them, kinda sorta. This letter to a north Georgia advice columnist seems a bit more anguished:

My next-door neighbor walks around her house in the nude. I know because I have seen her. She has curtains on her windows, but when the lights are on at night, you can see EVERYTHING. The other night I heard my 10-year-old son and some of his friends giggling and found them spying on her with a pair of binoculars. I’m sure she does not know she can be seen through her curtains.

Or maybe she does know. The columnist thinks an anonymous note is in order, but cautions:

If your neighbor does not install some sort of window shades or blinds and continues to parade around in the buffo, well … she enjoys putting on a show and there’s nothing you can do about it short of telling your son it’s not polite to stare.

Depending on local laws, there may be something that can be done about it, but what I want to know is this: how come I never manage to find any neighbors like that? (Especially since my neighborhood, of late, is seriously Babe-Enhanced™, yet.)

(Via this nudiarist tweet.)

There’s a long-standing tradition where Deborah Henson-Conant comes from, and it goes like this:

On your birthday, someone gives you a rose and your job is to head out for a long walk and take this rose with you. It’s generally better if you’re in a city with a lot of people around, because your job is to find the person who belongs to that rose. And when you find them, you explain this is your Birthday Rose — and if they’ll take it, then you get to make a wish and they get to make a wish, and both those wishes will come true.

Just don’t try to find exactly where she’s coming from.

(You’ve perhaps seen this flower before.)

I lifted this from Morgan Freeberg’s “Hello Kitty of Blogging” page:

So I guess you’re supposed to do a math-sign-three to put hearts in your text messages. I hadn’t been doing that because I’m a manly dude and I figure that’s for women, girls and punks. So some enlightened folks went to work on me and convinced me that’s a retrosexual way of looking at things and it’s okay for men to put hearts in things. I tried it and people didn’t know what I was doing … oops, I was doing greater-than-three instead of less-than-three. I think that’s boobs.

One can <3 >3s; in fact, so doing makes it (relatively) unnecessary to have to present your Dude Card™.

I took to <3 fairly easily myself, mostly because the first integer you come to heading downwards from 3 is 2, and I’m just weird enough to think that 2 is something to aspire to.

Nissan sales are booming — in the last decade they’ve boosted their US market share from about four percent to twice that — yet they get no press to speak of, and their product line ranges from ancient (Sentra) to anodyne (Altima) to alarming (Murano CrossCabrio). TTAC’s Edward Niedermeyer brought up the “ancient” issue with a Nissan official, and got this as a response:

Nissan’s VP for Communications David Reuter told us that this fact was what made him so optimistic about Nissan’s future. If sales are doing this well with product this old, he wondered aloud, what might happen if … say, models representing 75% of Nissan’s sales volume were replaced in a two-year span? He admitted that one of the brand’s biggest issues was breaking through the Honda-Toyota monopoly on media perceptions of Japanese automakers, and he suggested that a new product blitz was the only way to really accomplish that. I was reminded of the current darling of the mass-market brands, Hyundai, which grew sales steadily with aging and stolid but value-laden products, before replacing its entire lineup with eye-catching new models. Could a fresh batch of new designs do the same for Nissan?

Hard to say for sure. The funky little Cube isn’t selling all that well, but the far-funkier and no-less-little Juke is making bank. And the new Versa, unapologetically cheap, is scoring well with people who’d otherwise be buying a three-year-old Civic but live in constant fear of timing belts, a market far larger than I’d ever realized.

I think one thing holding the Hamburger back is its obsession with CVTs: even the Maxima, the ostensible “four-door sports car,” is saddled with one of these contraptions, and once you’ve seen the tach sitting at 4800 the entire time you’ve been climbing the onramp, you don’t particularly want to see it again. If they’re going to ask just-under-Infiniti money for this thing, they might as well bolt in Infiniti’s seven-speed auto and be done with it.

And I think the Frontier pickup, like every other pickup in the market, has been bloated beyond recognition. Were it not for that damned chicken tax, they could bring in a nice small truck, the kind that made their name in the States.

Except, of course, that their name at the time was “Datsun.”

I suppose there could be mirth in the juxtaposition of titles or of artists, but what’s funny here is the pairing of album titles at the far end:

These were parked next to each other on my shuffle playlist this morning. They did not actually get played together, but now I’m thinking I should have forced the deal.

Neiman’s is selling this lovely little Diane von Furstenberg wrapsie from DvF’s Fall 2011 collection:

If your immediate thought is “Didn’t I just see this on the First Lady?” you’re thinking along the same lines as I am, but apparently we’re both wrong:

To be precise:

The dress that the First Lady is wearing isn’t actually an original Diane von Furstenberg at all. It’s this knock-off of this particular DvF dress made by internet retailer ASOS — the ASOS Midi Body-Conscious Dress in Metallic Stripe, priced at a budget-conscious $71.88 (though it’s currently sold out).

This is normally where my Cheap Bastard mechanism kicks in, and I point out that Mrs O saved four hundred American dollars by buying the fake. Which is true, but that’s not the point. This is:

It’s the fact that it’s a knockoff of DvF, a well-known and well-respected American designer, that’s really the problem. You see, Diane is the President of Council of Fashion Designers of America, and has used her position to champion design protection for designers who have been victims of copyright infringement, such as this ASOS knock-off of her own design. She has been instrumental in supporting legislation that would define fashion as a form of copyright-protected art and give recourse to designers whose work is stolen, copied and sold for cheap. She’s even written extensively on the subject for major American newspapers.

Then again, if you look at the back of the DvF original — see the Neiman’s link — it’s really hard to spot the stab marks.

I suppose that in the Best of All Possible Worlds, it wouldn’t be necessary to do any marketing for classical music: the audience would be there, and more important, it would be there, actually having paid for tickets.

This world being several dozen notches down from that, orchestras have to do their marketing research just like everyone else, which usually means “badly.” Hence this project:

A pro bono third-party study by Oliver Wyman (Audience Growth Initiative) found that on average, symphonies lost 55% of their customers each year; churn among first-time concert-goers was 91%! The study also confirmed that the solution to churn was to move beyond “averages” and to begin looking at the wide variations between starkly different customer groups.

The symphony audience was divided into a core audience, trialists (first-time concert-goers), non-committed (a few concerts a year), special occasion attendees, snackers (people who purchase small subscriptions for years), and high potentials (frequent attendees who haven’t bought a subscription). In Boston, for example, members of the Boston Symphony Orchestra (BSO) core audience represented just 26% of the customer base but bought 56% of the tickets. Trialists composed 37% of the base, but bought only 11% of the tickets. In monetary terms, core audience members had a 5-year value close to $5,000; trialists, just $199. With that data, the orchestras’ new mission became more targeted. The goal wasn’t broadly to reduce churn but to convert trialists into steady customers.

So the orchestras decided to find out what would keep the trialists in the fold, and it turns out, quality of the musical offerings wasn’t that much of a factor. The novices were discouraged by more trivial matters:

The most powerful “driver of revisitation” was parking! As with other orchestras, veteran members of the core BSO audience had figured out where to park, but trialists identified it as a huge hassle — so they didn’t come back. Another driver was the ability to exchange tickets; trialists found the “no refunds, no exchanges” policy a deal breaker.

Of course, in Boston you can take the Green Line to Symphony Hall and avoid parking matters altogether.

Now I’m curious as to where folks are parking to attend events at Civic Center Music Hall — or where they’re going to park once they’ve finished reorganizing downtown again.

(Via TYWKIWDBI.)

A couple of years ago, we were debating the non-chromatic value of automotive colors, and this wisdom was proffered (not by me):

[I]t would be an interesting job for the Mythbusters to determine if white cars really do stay cooler than, say, red. (My gut feeling is “probably not, but the window tinting will help.”)

Well, there’s now actual research on the matter:

Researchers in Berkeley Lab’s Environmental Energy Technologies Division have published a new study that suggests cooler-colored cars could be up to 2 percent more fuel efficient than darker-colored ones. Their research shows that cooler colors like white and silver can reflect as much as 60 percent of the sun’s rays, while darker colors like black only reflect around 5 percent. This means that after sitting in the sun for an hour, a silver car’s roof is a full 45°F cooler than a black car’s roof, which, according to the researchers, would equate to a 9 to 11°F difference in cabin air temperature.

Nothing to sneer at. And here’s where they think they see the fuel savings:

If a cooler-colored car stays 9 to 11°F cooler inside on a hot, sunny day than a dark-colored car, it should require a smaller, more efficient air conditioning system to cool the cabin down to a comfortable temperature of 77°F within 30 minutes, which is an industry standard for vehicle air conditioning performance. The researchers then used a vehicle simulation tool to estimate the potential energy savings of using more reflective-colored paint to downsize air conditioners and found that switching from black to white or silver would increase fuel economy by 0.44 mpg, or 2.0 percent.

Then again, I have a white car with a “dark taupe” (something a bit darker than cheese mold) interior. I suspect that offsets some of the cool.

Facebook has taken it upon itself to make Lists for me, presumably based on an examination of my profile, the patterns by which I read, the phases of the moon, and their need for advertising revenue, not necessarily in that order. I had a few Lists, but evidently they won’t rest until everyone on my friends list (about 150, which is pretty close to the max if you ask Dunbar) appears in some List.

Inasmuch as my most recent stint in school was some time in the last century, I’m not finding a whole lot of material in school-based Lists. Specialized interests make more sense, but they haven’t gotten to that point yet, and I’m rather hoping they don’t.

What I really dread, though, is that they’ll somehow come up with a List of “Women After Whom You Have Lusted Vainly From Time To Time,” and that it might be somewhat accurate.

The surfer dudes who host this site sent along this bit of news in their monthly (and, lately, on time, which is miraculous enough) newsletter:

For over a year now the “DreamHost 101″ section of our newsletter has been highlighting little-known account features that many customers didn’t even know existed.

The problem is that the title “DreamHost 101″ isn’t particularly descriptive. It could mean anything, really! The 101 could refer to California’s Hollywood Freeway, an animated movie about dogs, or to the number that comes after 100. You just don’t know. It’s confusing.

This month, to clear up all ambiguity, we’re rechristening DreamHost 101. It’s now “DreamHost WTF”. The WTF stands for “What’s That Feature?” Obviously. Now there will be no confusion whatsoever.

But of course.

Occupy Oakland would like you to know that they “do not support the defecation of public property.”

So if you find something crappy in town, it’s not their fault.

(Original photo taken by Nancy Friedman.)

Urban (we’re talking Brooklyn here) librarian Screwy Decimal sends along an entry to a “Library of the Future” essay contest, an entry that didn’t make it into the finals, but which has a definite air of finality to it. I’ll lift just this one paragraph:

The poetry section will be the cruelest area in the library. In this section there exists no blood-hungry character, but an endless maze constructed of stone bricks. There is no roof. When one looks up there is an empty black sky without a moon that never changes, in other words it will always midnight. The atmosphere will bring upon different emotions that continuously shifts as well as endless thoughts about things such as the meaning of life and the values of nature etc. In the darkness of the maze, one would hear a young girl endlessly singing a lullaby until one who is in the maze reaches the point of madness and extreme boredom. What worst is that time will flow very quickly in this area because it is not parallel to the outside world. Before one knows it, one minute in the outside world will be one hundred years in the poetry section of the library. This area will bring upon despair.

I’m betting that twenty years from now, this poor soul will be hoisting a slightly-adulterated bottle of water in the Teachers’ Lounge and grumbling about how no one appreciates Matthew frickin’ Arnold anymore.

Note: Were old man Melvil here to read this, he’d point out that those poetry anthologies should probably be shelved at 808.81, and maybe I shouldn’t be making Beatles jokes in the twenty-first century. Lotta nerve for a guy who died 80 years ago.

A handy tip before the Apocalypse:

(Seen, obviously, at FAIL Blog’s WIN!)

The lovely and talented Emily from Naked DC analyzes this whole Herman Cain kerfuffle:

This is all kinds of super lame. Unless there’s a sex toy or an intern or a cigar or, for that matter, like thirty women he’s been hanging around with privately on the campaign trail, this really isn’t going to matter. Plus, it’s not like anyone was under the impression Herman Cain was making it to the big leagues, anyway. It doesn’t really make sense to keep hammering at this story unless someone’s really trying to scrape the bottom of the barrel. Justin Bieber is having a better day in terms of sex scandals.

Incidentally, she’s not about to blame Democrats for this:

The lack of creativity and innovation in these accusations leads me to believe we’re definitely dealing with a GOP inside job. Liberals always get way better stuff, like that time you were trolling Chuck E. Cheese in a tiger costume holding a bottle of Maker’s Mark, not that time you got a little too close to your secretary and threatened to get all crazy.

Not to mention the fact that I’ve never had a secretary, but let’s not mention that fact.

Having suffered from it myself, I recognized this syndrome at once:

I’m reading Dustbury this morning which leads to What do you do with a drunken sailor? which I haven’t heard in a zillion years, which leads me to the Roud Folk Song Index, which leads to my making a list of all the tunes I recognize from the list in Wikipedia. The full list has a zillion entries, but the Wikipedia page only lists about 750. Most of them I have never heard of, but then I see one I had forgotten about, which leads to looking at the next page, which leads to another tune I had forgotten about, and so I ended up reading all the way to the end.

To encourage further exploration, here are factoids regarding a few of the songs he mentions:

• Olivia Newton-John recorded “Banks of the Ohio” back in 1971. It was a hit in Britain and Australia, but not in the States, even in Ohio. (On the other hand, her cover of Dylan’s “If Not For You” went over well Stateside.)
• Johnny and the Hurricanes reworked “Blue-Tail Fly” into the rockin’ “Beatnik Fly.”
• Speaking of the Blue-Tail Fly, Tom Lehrer used it to poke fun at “The Folk-Song Army,” who regard “innocuous” folk songs with scorn: “The folks who sing ‘em have no social conscience / Why, they don’t even care if Jimmie crack corn.”
• “There Was a Crooked Man,” retitled “Don’t Let the Rain Come Down,” was a 1964 hit for the Serendipity Singers.
• Allan Sherman contributed this bit:

  On top of old Smokey
  All covered with hair
  Of course I’m referring
  To Smokey the Bear

  It’s in the same medley as this classic.

• A record of “My Bonnie” was the first waxing involving the Beatles, though on that late-’61 disk they were serving as backup for singer Tony Sheridan. (The B-side: “The Saints,” as in “when The Saints go marching in.”) This wasn’t the first rock version, though: Duane Eddy twanged his way through something he called “Bonnie Came Back,” which charted in early 1960. That Sheridan/Beatles thing remained buried in the US until 1964, when suddenly anything the Beatles had had anything to do with became eminently salable.

Incidentally, the Band’s “Up on Cripple Creek” — “a drunkard’s dream if I ever did see one” — has no discernible connection to the old Appalachian folk number.

Even fans of Rebecca Black’s “Friday” might grouse about the generally low production values and lack of polish in the original video. (What do you want for four grand, anyway?) Her third single, “Person of Interest,” due later this month, apparently will offer no such unpretentiousness:

Hey, at least it isn’t “O Fortuna.”

And this “Friday”-related item is too weird not to pass on:

The Facebook text affixed thereto:

This picture is from a music video. Do you see what’s circled? I bet you didn’t before I told you. The government went into deep investigation on this picture. That girl died in that house in 1887. This picture has been cursed. Now that you have seen that girl, she will visit you. Repost to save your life. Don’t take any chances.

At least fifteen thousand people did exactly that.

Says Rebecca in response:

LOL I’M SO SCARED MY MOM IS GOING TO VISIT ME.

And I’m pretty sure Anaheim Hills as we know it didn’t exist in 1887.

Now how am I going to resist a title like 7 Words I Never Want To See In Your Blog Posts?

Actually, this really isn’t a list of words: it’s a list of this one guy’s particular bêtes noires, and most of it seems pretty inarguable, except for this:

Putting Two Spaces After Periods — Argue with me all you want, but this is no longer necessary. If you want the long explanation, check out this article in Slate, but for our purposes, let’s just say it’s an antiquated rule based on type-faces available to printers at the time and has no bearing on our writing today. This habit took me a few weeks to break, but there is absolutely no reason why you should be putting two spaces after every period in your blog writing anymore. Stop it.

In fact, I do this routinely, and no one has ever said a word, and do you know why? Because browsers take out extraneous spaces: “[i]f you write 10 spaces in your text, the browser will remove 9 of them, before displaying the page.” So I’ll type the same way I’ve typed for the last forty-odd years, thank you very much.

Incidentally, if you look at the link, it says “8 Words I Never Want [To] See.” Which means he took one out. Anyone want to guess what it might have been, or declare what it should have been?

(Via this Prof KRG tweet.)

Last month I tossed out what might have seemed to be a throwaway line about living “in a Neighborhood of the Year nominee.”

Well, now you can amend “nominee” to read “winner.”

It was just yesterday that I snapped up this quotation:

The lack of creativity and innovation in these accusations leads me to believe we’re definitely dealing with a GOP inside job. Liberals always get way better stuff, like that time you were trolling Chuck E. Cheese in a tiger costume holding a bottle of Maker’s Mark.

Then again, once in a blue moon — and in this case, in a blue state — Republicans find something with marginal entertainment value:

A Monroe County [New York] legislator running for re-election on Tuesday has admitted that he posted naked photos of himself on a personal website.

C. Stephen Eckel removed two of the photos Friday after 13WHAM’s Sean Carroll questioned Eckel about the photographs. Eckel confirmed he took the photos, which he describes as artistic.

Well, yeah, he would. Then again, he has served as adjunct professor of photography at a local community college, and God knows they don’t pay adjuncts enough to hire models.

Eckel’s official statement:

“Today, we have seen Monroe County Republicans stoop to a new low in order to distract the public from the real issues facing county taxpayers — the crushing property tax burden, need for jobs and the culture of corruption that has plagued county government. My opponent has run a negative smear campaign that has distorted the facts.”

First question: are there positive smear campaigns?

I didn’t see any references to it, or to much of anything, on his opponent’s Web site, which is bland to the max, though said opponent does contribute the expected sound bite to the story.

However, Eckel’s claim (in the video) that he didn’t realize these shots were so easily Googleable makes him look like a hopeless naïf. Were I running GOP campaigns in the Rochester area, that’s the angle I’d be hitting.

(Via this nudiarist tweet.)

I grumble a lot about Yahoo! Answers, but I continue to hang out there, generally confining myself to subjects I know something about, motivated by the fact that there are lots of people even dumber than I am.

Which is why this is so dispiriting:

A growing number of college presidents and faculty are concerned about student plagiarism in the Internet age. But the questions raised by this analysis go beyond ethics. Wouldn’t professors be disheartened to learn that a significant share of students are harvesting their facts not from an old-fashioned encyclopedia but from Yahoo Answers?

Y!A, apparently, is second only to Wikipedia as a source of, um, “borrowed content,” despite this:

On this site … accuracy is determined by a popular vote. Fact and opinion dwell side by side.

Disclosure: I got a Best Answer this week for something I answered a year ago; the answer turned out to be wrong after all — the company changed its plans — but it’s too late to do anything about it now.

(Via Fark.)

Somebody, somewhere, is imagining Famke Janssen on a bicycle. If it’s you, then this is what you’re looking for:

So far as I can tell, this dates to mid-August, but she’s been an avid cyclist for some time.

And today she’s 46 years old, which seems as improbable to me as it might to you.

(Title source, in case you missed it.)

These days, we’re told that we need a content creation strategy, whatever the heck that’s supposed to be, and you can’t have a strategy without some sort of gimmick: hence there exists a National Blog Posting Month.

The Friar describes his own experience:

November is the month bloggers are encouraged to post every day; it has some squashed-together name but I can never remember it. I’ve done that the last couple of years, but last year, when December 1 came around, I thought I might try to continue the schedule and see how far I could take it. Today’s post means I have posted at least one entry every day for a year. I haven’t done that much continuous writing since I worked for the newspaper.

Of course, having a life can get in the way:

So when I was going to be at church camp, I could pre-write a few posts and set them up to show up one a day. Some may call that cheating, to which I have to reply, there’s a rulebook for this? And, bite me.

Disclosure: At any given moment, I generally have one to five posts in the can, ready to go. (At one point last week, I had nine.) This enables me to dole them out on a schedule that creates the impression that I do this all day, every day, which is obviously not true since I have a day job for 45-50 hours a week and I really don’t have time to write at work. Almost all the stuff you see here Monday will have been written Sunday, possibly even on Saturday.

Still, I do manage to squeeze out at least one post a day, and have done so since, let’s see, June 23, 2000. So my personal “content creation strategy” is actually health-related: should I miss a day, you should probably assume that something horrible has happened to me. In fact, this may be the only way anyone would know, given my tendency to play my real-life cards close to the vest.

Whose barn? What barn? Darn near everybody’s barn in this part of the world. At 10:53 an earthquake tentatively estimated at 5.2 struck, rattling all manner of things and the people sitting near them. (My monitor almost did a half-gainer off the desk.)

The epicenter was between Sparks and Davenport, about 45 miles east of Oklahoma City. The Twitterverse reported rumbles as far away as Fort Worth and Kansas City.

I dutifully turned in a report to the US Geological Survey, though I have to tell you, I had to go back and redo several fields: I was shaking myself for the first few minutes.

Update: USGS now says 5.6.

Over at Roger’s, the case is made for “The Boxer” as the finest record in the Simon and Garfunkel oeuvre:

Very few major artists could get away with the opening line to this song, but Simon’s delivery not only suspends mundane reality, it welcomes the listener into a story so matter-of-factly that one simply assumes its authenticity. Garfunkel’s intimate, intuitive harmony is so finely crafted and performed that it’s nearly transparent; like the guitars, it focuses attention on the song, rather than itself. The inclusion of the bass harmonica compliments and emphasizes the narrative so well, that it achieves an aura of inevitability.

Roger, incidentally, says he didn’t write that: a spammer, he says, left it, and he decided to make use of it. I conclude that he gets higher-quality spammers than I do.

Incidentally, even people who don’t particularly care for S&G endorse “The Boxer.” Dave Marsh, circa 1988, considered it the 801st best song of the rock era:

More than any of their other sixties collaborations, “The Boxer” remains a record, meaning its gimmicks mainly outweigh its pretensions, that the performance brings the composition to life, and that filtering in the orchestration toward the end actually works as something other than a post-Beatles pop convention.

Which is something you’d never say of, for instance, “A Simple Desultory Philippic.”

“The Boxer” is, you should know, one of my top three S&G tracks, alongside “For Emily, Whenever I May Find Her,” which makes no damn sense at all but which brings a chill every time I hear it, and the non-LP “You Don’t Know Where Your Interest Lies,” by far the nastiest lyric Simon ever aimed at anyone in those days, which is probably why it was buried on the B-side of “Fakin’ It.” They did play it live in New York in 1967, though Simon said at the time that it wasn’t finished yet.

There’s only a three-week window of opportunity, so yesterday I ventured forth in search of McRib.

Yeah, yeah, I know. I’ve heard it all. And I don’t care. As far as I’m concerned, it’s the apotheosis of Mystery Meat. A baffled rep from the Timese machine tried to make sense of it, but gave up:

I just don’t understand why it’s so coveted. Is this some contrived scheme from McDonald’s? We want what we can’t have. But we shouldn’t want this. If they offered it year round, it simply wouldn’t sell!

It’s got a chemical from gym mats banned in Europe, for crying out loud! And its look is not appealing, plain and simple.

In fact, McRib was offered year-round starting in 1981, and was dropped for lackluster sales four years later, only to be reinstated in 1994. The first “farewell tour” was in 2005, and ever since then McRib has been available only sporadically.

The gym-mat chemical, incidentally, is azodicarbonamide, aka E927, used to enhance the bun. US law permits up to 45 parts per million. The European Union considers the stuff “harmful.” I’m guessing that the German McRib, which doesn’t go on hiatus, doesn’t have it.

But maybe Time got the last laugh: they include a link to “Our Ten Favorite McFoods,” which seems to contain nothing at all.

By now most people have had the disconcerting experience of having some medical procedure or other deemed Not Covered because the physician didn’t enter a code that passed muster with the insurance company. Dr. B used to say that “I could either know billing or know medicine.” But now there’s a whole new set of codes:

Physicians have gotten a few laughs from the new and voluminous set of diagnostic codes known as ICD-10, which distinguishes between being struck by a duck (W6162XA) and being bitten by a duck (W6161XA).

[Insert "quack" joke here.]

The new codes were required as part of HIPAA. As it happens, ICD-10 is five times the size of the old ICD-9, and it’s not so hard to see why:

ICD-9, for example, recognizes that patients may seek treatment because they were bitten, and gives clinicians a few choices, such as dog, rat, snake, arthropod, unspecified animal, or human.

ICD-10, in contrast, is a veritable zoo of bite codes — horse, cow, cat, pig, shark, dolphin, sea lion, alligator, macaw, parrot, and duck, to name just a few new kinds of jaws. And for each kind of bite, physicians can pick a code for an initial encounter, subsequent encounter, or sequela.

And from the Just Try to Top This file:

Some accident codes, however, defy the imagination, such as the famous V9107XA: burn due to water-skis on fire, initial encounter.

But there’s still no code for being turned into a newt, or for recovery therefrom.

And you presumably do not wish to incur the wrath of the Obsidian Order, either.

(Snitched from Bill Walko’s Facebook page.)

We (by which I mean “I”) may as well get used to it:

The student directory at the local snoburbia middle school — always in paper booklet form — is now being delivered in “app” form: “The App is accessible through iPhone, Android, Blackberry and even your desktop computer.”

“Even” your desktop computer, obviously the lowest of the low — excepting of course my phone, which is generally ignorant of the entire concept of “app.”

Just once, I’d like to see something like this in the server logs, somewhere among the two-fifths of site visitors who arrive here via random searches:

“I am a person who wants to know things, or thinks he wants to know things. My desire for knowledge is exceeded only by my apparent inability to construct a functional search string. I am forced to scroll through hundreds of items to find the one I really want. Google must accept its responsibility to give me what I want, when I want it. I am the 40%.”

In the meantime, we have these:

“You have my full attention” meaning:  I’m sorry, did you say something?

normal rpm’s for a 96 mazda 626:  If it’s not running, zero. If it is running, higher than that.

making a poster about yourself “learn me better”:  And then bring it to English class and see if anyone notices.

transmission revil kit:  Just go to the customer waiting area of any auto repair shop. You’ll hear many transmissions being reviled.

illuminati hobby lobby david green:  I guess someone found out that Mr Green drives a Fnord F-150.

millionaire women ann Taylor loft:  If you’re that anxious to meet them, there are better places to stalk them.

silly gifts like bladeless knives without handles:  What’s silly about that? No moving parts, no choking hazard, no danger whatsoever. The government would certainly approve.

oklahoma rejects daylight saving time:  Um, no. What we reject is silly gifts like bladeless knives without handles.

lesbiterians:  Third-fastest growing denomination, trailing only the Methheadists and the Faptists.

halloween pranks naked:  Not a good idea, for two reasons: (1) it’s damn near November, and (2) someone without a costume tends to stand out.

why do they say don’t play with your food:  Because you might lose, and wouldn’t that be embarrassing, coming second best to a plate full of Brussels sprouts?

solutions of charles g. hill:  Forget it. That sucker won’t dissolve in anything.

Gerard Van der Leun, having been granted, if not a new lease on life, certainly a much-desired renewal, is finding that it is not so easy to adjust to a pace he finds unremittingly slow:

It is only in the last few weeks that the virtue of patience is beginning to dawn on me. That virtue is, “If you are patient with yourself, you may live. If you insist on running the 4 minute mile this afternoon, you will be checked out of here in a wicker basket.” In short, “patience” is no longer an option but a requirement. My previous reaction to illness has been to get over it and then get back to work. No such option here.

Roger Bannister, who knows something about the 4 minute mile, had this to say:

“Doctors and scientists said that breaking the four-minute mile was impossible, that one would die in the attempt. Thus, when I got up from the track after collapsing at the finish line, I figured I was dead.”

Sir Roger has thus far survived 57 years since that incident. But the best advice so far seems to have come from Ric Locke in Gerard’s comment section:

What you have to do is give over optimism, at least the sort of bumptious, forceful optimism that demands that the next thing be better. That’s how the OWS kiddies got where they are. No matter how well things turn out there’s always something not quite perfect, so they get disappointed and either bitter or furious, depending on personality. The true pessimist, on the other hand, goes through life with a spring in his step and a smile on his face; nothing happens that’s worse than expected, and all his surprises are happy ones.

After not being killed by the strongest earthquake in Oklahoma history Saturday night, I find this advice most useful.

If you’re contemplating the Forever Lazy, be aware that you will be judged:

I normally don’t care about people’s clothing choices but damn, this is just wrong. It’s worse than yoga pants at work. It’s worse than wearing leggings as pants with a cropped shirt. It’s worse than sweats with words on the ass. It’s the ultimate in loss of self-respect, the final way to say “I quit. I’m done. It’s over.”

Well, let’s see:

Yep.

Prepare to feel as though you’ve been hit in the knee. The very first cheerleaders, explains Michael Kaplan, were men:

These are liberal German nationalists of the 1830s, dreaming of a time when the repressive petty monarchies imposed on a great people by the cynical Congress of Vienna would be swept away in a surge of popular vigor and national virility, creating a single, democratic Germany under the red, black and gold. In preparation — realizing that, say, “Revolutionary Training Clubs” might attract official attention — they formed indoor sporting groups to strengthen mind and body for the struggle, practicing unarmed exercises to which they gave the classical name of gymnastik (though they stopped short of doing what the Greek word actually means: “that which is performed nude”).

When their glorious moment arrived in 1848, the revolutionary gymnasts bounded out of hiding — and were utterly defeated. Faced with certain death or prison, many chose emigration to America, where, as university graduates already knowing a foreign language, they quickly got jobs in the forest of new colleges springing up in the Midwest. Their indoor gymnastik seemed an ideal sport for institutions battling hard winters and tight budgets — and thereafter, who could be better to lead the new fad of massed cheering then men trained for rhythmic movement in a somewhat Germanic atmosphere?

And it took rather a long time for them to be replaced by women, unlike the case with, for instance, telephone operators:

When telephone companies began hiring operators, they chose teenage boys for the job. But the companies soon regretted their decision. Boys had done a great job working in telegraph offices. And they worked for low wages. But being a telephone operator was a tough job that required lots of patience — something the boys didn’t have. The boy operators quickly turned telephone offices upside down. They wrestled instead of worked. They pulled pranks on callers, and even cursed at them.

In 1878, the Boston Telephone Despatch company began hiring women operators instead. Women, the companies thought, would behave better than boys. Women had pleasant voices that customers — most of whom were men — would like. And because society did not treat women equally, they could be paid less and supervised more strictly than men.

The difference today, of course, is that former operators are still considered to be actual Serious People, while former cheerleaders, regardless of their credentials, are hardly ever taken seriously.

Ben Zimmer reviews the fifth-edition American Heritage Dictionary, which may or may not be the Last Print Dictionary Ever, but which, like its predecessors, is informed by a Usage Panel, people outside lexicography who work with words for a living. The panel doesn’t overrule the editors, but its members always have something to say. This time:

The often conservative pronouncements of the Usage Panel have never greatly interfered with the descriptive work of AHD’s lexicographers — who, after all, were the first to include the full panoply of vulgar four-letter words in 1969 (complete with careful etymological notes). Over the years, however, the panelists have grown less reactionary, and the notes derived from their opinions are more accepting of informal, not-quite-standard styles.

The new chair of the Usage Panel, Harvard psychology professor Steven Pinker, observes in his introductory essay that “resistance is melting” to formerly nettlesome usage points involving such words as “comprise,” “decimate,” “graduate,” “moot,” and “quote.” Pinker examined the survey responses to one item of particular interest to him: the rise of the irregular past-tense verb “snuck” at the expense of the regular “sneaked,” as discussed in his 1999 book, Words and Rules. He found that the shift has been precipitated not so much by a mellowing of the panelists as they grow older but by “an increasing number of younger panelists who have no problem with ‘snuck’.” Thus are innovations snuck into the language.

As for “moot,” it seems to have drifted from “open to debate” to “of no consequence,” nearly a reversal of its original meaning: after all, if it’s of no consequence, it’s barely worth debating, amirite? (And what are the chances that “amirite” merits an entry in AHD 5?) “Moot” isn’t the first word that’s gone that way, either: when I see “peruse” these days, it’s more likely to indicate “glance at perfunctorily” rather than its original “study in great detail.” Explaining how that snuck in is definitely above my pay grade.

I don’t expect AHD 5 to be quite as controversial as Webster’s Third New International, arguably the least-prescriptive dictionary on earth and reviled in some circles for abandoning that responsibility, but I have to figure that someone will find a reason to dislike it. Someone always does.

(Via Language Log.)

Testy alpaca is testy:

(Original here, and there’s more where that came from.)

When I was a kid playing with blocks, back in the Old Silurian period, I’d occasionally set up a simulated auto dashboard, with the 1 through 9 blocks arranged in a semicircle to serve as speedometer.

I figure you needed to know that before reading all this.

(And that this Autoblog article suggested it.)