In the proper Carlinian sense, you may be sure.

Steve writes to the Consumerist:

A few years back I bought my mother an Epson Artisan 800 all-in-one. The Artisan line is generally well reviewed and performs well. A few months ago we had a nasty surprise. Turning the printer on resulted in an error message on the screen that the ink pads were at the end of their service life and to contact Epson for assistance.

The printer was 100% unusable at this time, even for non-print related things like scanning. By whim of a bit of software code, my all-in-one was non-functional. It is worth noting that even immediately prior to this error message the printer performed flawlessly in all respects.

So he contacted Epson for assistance, with the following, um, results:

Upon working my way through Epson’s “support” system I was told by a representative that repairing the printer would cost $180 plus shipping. Considering that a new printer with similar capabilities could be had for the same amount or less, I turned them down. Now, by itself this isn’t so surprising; the printer manufacturers want you to buy new printers all the time so they engineer them to be cheap enough to discard and replaced. Epson’s own web site even says that “Epson recommends replacing the printer” when the ink pads are at the end of their service life. Yup, that’s Epson: A few pennies worth of disposable cotton pad gets dirty and you need to replace the entire printer. I sometimes try to imagine what Epson employees do when they run out of clean underwear.

This, of course, assumes that they actually own any clean underwear: one does not expect attention to minor details like that from the manufacturers of Today’s Crappy Printers™.

I have an HP DeskJet at work that arbitrarily decided last week that the black cartridge was defective. Not empty: defective. I duly replaced it; the brand-new one did not work either. I conclude that HP really wants this printer to die, and was too [insert term for poultry droppings] to say so up front.

Meanwhile, my turn-of-the-century HP DeskJet at home has never failed me. Were they building them better back in the Nineties? What do you think?

This surprises me less than you think:

The complete analysis:

A real hard worker you are, yup. If there’s one thing you hate, it’s being inactive or coming across as lazy. You’ll put in more effort than anyone else, even if it may be against your better judgment or even if delegating your work is a smarter option. It’s not surprising to see you working all day long, even if it’s to help friends out. However, friendship is still important to you, so you will always, always stick to your commitments and keep your promises.

You’re a tell-it-like-it-is pony, not holding your tongue and telling whoever whatever’s on your mind or what your true thoughts are. Thankfully, you can still pick your words carefully and still keep some sensitivity towards what you say. But, others may find you irritable in appearance if you’re not getting your way or you feel against something.

You are also most likely to be athletic and into staying fit, knowing that if you’re not, you won’t be able to keep up with your work. Fashion and looking good aren’t on the top of your priorities, to say the least. You also tend to be very protective of your friends, standing up for them against anyone who is causing them problems, and usually succeeding in warding off any foes. You’d gladly lose a limb if it meant saving a friend’s life.

Well, I’m not particularly athletic, though I suspect I could make some fruit fall from the tree if I kicked it hard enough. F=ma, y’all.

(I blame this on Fluttershy Fillyjonk.)

Just a few excerpts from a very long piece which occasionally lapses into (I’m assuming) Russian:

Footwear on weighty to a scamp — how correctly to choose these sex pumps?

Obvious women like to look soberly in footwear on высокогом a heel. Anyhow, there are certain secrets about which each the missis should advised of, carrying these sexual pumps. Here some of them as a last resort to offer on correctly.

Tough and roughcast surfaces

If you force planned prowl in greensward the oldest clear-sightedness will talk to you to push footwear on intoxication to a heel. As places with rough and unjust surfaces or a formless party line are iffy reasonably, as you could lose easily balance, effective on these surfaces. By itself, you would not like to winding up with an anklebone or bruises if you secure fallen, after all so? So record unswerving that you punctiliously know where you go and outfit in order footwear also in behalf of each one by one entranced case. This acuteness takes place also for the sake places with a estimable amount of a snitch, external parks and woods. To you good palpate of feet and extensive relax in return feet after such walks can be demanded.

This advice is, I think, reasonably iffy. There’s also a reference to what to do when confronted with “apertures of drainage for the benefit of water.”

(That string of Cyrillic characters will probably look like hell in any character set other than UTF-8).

One of the more amusing stories of late involves McDonald’s to-the-letter interpretation of a San Francisco ordinance that forbids eateries to give away toys: Mickey D has started charging a dime for the little plastic (or whatever) tchotchke, which is then donated to the Ronald McDonald House. The Board of Supervisors, I think it’s safe to assume, is on par with other governmental bodies when it comes to dealing with the Law of Unintended Consequences.

The Consumerist version of the story drew this comment from one “squinko esq.”:

Anyone who doesn’t feed their children organic, free-trade, gluten-free, sugar-free, fat-free meals made fresh from scratch for every single meal is a fucking monster. Children shouldn’t be allowed to eat anything that might possibly taste good, nor should they be allowed to play with cheap plastic toys. Handmade, hypoallergenic crafts made from sustainable sources that don’t have sharp corners and don’t promote the cisgendered, heteronormative, neurotypical White patriarchy is good enough for my kids and should be good enough for everyone else’s.

Question: Did “squinko” miss anything there?

Okay, they haven’t actually slain anyone, but their list of the 50 worst music videos ever is filled with, shall we say, some fairly harsh language.

This is what they had to say about “Friday”:

Perhaps it was the £5 budget special effects or maybe the fact that there were dental braces everywhere we looked or even the bratty stage school kids pretending to drive around in a car. Black herself came across as kind of sweet and naive, but the sense of an evil puppet master behind the scenes controlling everything couldn’t be escaped. In the end, there was so much to dislike it was quite overwhelming. This was the equivalent of repeatedly getting bitten on the ankles by a yappy dog.

This not-especially-kind review is not, of course, the circumstance that led Rebecca Black to pose for the photograph at left. (This is.) And I’m reasonably certain that if she’s crying at all, it’s in the classic Liberace fashion: all the way to the bank. However, I note with some amusement that of NME’s three least favorite videos, two involve songs mentioned on this very site: “Friday,” of course, and Susan Boyle’s cover of Lou Reed’s “Perfect Day,” which wasn’t necessarily a Friday at all. (I have not heard the Kings of Leon track they disparaged, but then I figure if I need to, I would have no trouble coming up with reasons to disparage Kings of Leon on my own.)

The product specialist at the auto show may in fact be a lovely woman, but she’s not there to serve as eye candy. (Okay, she’s not there just to serve as eye candy.) She’s got to know the product line cold, if only to stay ahead of the wise guys who think they can stump her. (See, for instance, this one, who epitomizes the current standard.)

Turn the clock back a few decades, and there’s less emphasis on product knowledge and more emphasis on being decorative. Mandated clothing was generally either scanty or scantier. And Curbside Classic has photographic evidence of one particular show where two of the young ladies — well, okay, they might have been wearing earrings. Hard to tell at this distance.

You may remember this from early 2007:

The lawsuit is about the price cardholders of Visa-, MasterCard-, or Diners Club-branded payment cards were charged to make transactions in a foreign currency, or with a foreign merchant, between February 1, 1996 and November 8, 2006. Plaintiffs challenge how the prices of credit and debit/ATM card foreign transactions were set and disclosed, including claims that Visa, MasterCard, their member banks, and Diners Club conspired to set and conceal fees, typically of 1-3% of foreign transactions, and that Visa and MasterCard inflated their base exchange rates before applying these fees. The Defendants include Visa, MasterCard, Diners Club, Bank of America, Bank One/First USA, Chase, Citibank, MBNA, HSBC/Household, and Washington Mutual/Providian.

Some of those defendants, you’ll note, no longer exist as separate entities. I mentioned later that year that I was turning in a claim form; the expected payback was somewhere around $25.

Four years (almost to the day) after that post, a check for $18.04 arrived. Says the fine print: “All refund amounts are reduced because the full amount of all the claims exceeds the amount in the settlement fund.” You may be absolutely certain that the attorneys’ fees were not reduced in the slightest.

Still, it’s eighteen bucks and change, which, given the usual pitiful settlements in class-action suits — typically, $5 off something you wouldn’t buy in the first place — counts as a legitimate win. And apparently there is a second suit, for which I may already be enrolled as a member of the aggrieved class, inasmuch as they sent me instructions on how to exclude myself from same. We’ll see if any more dollars drop on my doorstep in 2015.

A friend of mine, after running up against the fact that old cars that aren’t worth a lot still need maintenance, got rid of her ’94 Honda Accord and bought a somewhat newer Nissan Altima. It occurs to me that maybe she should have parted it out, since that’s what the professional thieves do:

Of the 52,000 Honda Accords stolen in 2010, more than 44,000 were 1990s models. Less than 6,000 were made in the 2000s.

When the pieces are broken out, the parts are worth more than the cars. The fuel line for a 1994 Honda goes for about $375, the air conditioner compressor sells for around $350, and an antilock brake part sells for around $450. Just those three parts $1,175. Comparatively, Kelley Blue Book says an excellent condition four-door 1994 Honda Accord is valued at around $1,900.

I’d like to know what “antilock brake part” can be had for $450. I can get two brand-new wheel sensors for that kind of money. (Never mind what the control module costs.) Maybe I should inquire at the nearest chop shop.

We open with a quote from Robert Stacy McCain’s original Rule 5 piece:

It’s not just guys who enjoy staring at pictures of hotties. If you’ve ever picked up Cosmo or Glamour, you realize that chicks enjoy looking at pretty girls, too. (NTTAWWT.) Maybe it’s the vicious catty she-thinks-she’s-all-that factor, or the schadenfreude of watching a human trainwreck like Britney Spears, but no one can argue that celebrity babes generate traffic.

So I’m thinking: do they have to be celebrity babes? How about a reasonably public figure who is not actually in showbiz?

Okay, there’s an NBA connection, kinda sorta, involving the soon-to-be-relocating New Jersey Brooklyn Nets. Background:

The Atlantic Yards project [in Brooklyn] cleared a major hurdle … when New York State was granted the right to use eminent domain for the development. The project has had a long political history pitting the developer, Forest City Ratner, against local groups, and an equally interesting design history.

MaryAnne Gilmartin, Executive Vice-President of Forest City Ratner, is in charge of the Atlantic Yards development. Gilmartin has spent 15 years at Forest City. Doesn’t seem to have worn her down much:

In general, I am not a big fan of eminent domain, but obviously I am easily distracted.

(Original photo from this Jenna Goudreau article for Forbes.)

You want to run for President? Are you out of your cotton-picking fabric-creating mind?

Not only is there the burden of governing a superpower in an explosive world, but our manic media ensures that, if you’re a Republican candidate, you’ll be subject to routine, public colonoscopies, while if you’re a Democratic candidate, you receive the kind of fawning sycophancy that created the same delusions of grandeur that drove many European monarchs mad.

Any job description for the job of president in 2012 should end with the words “only megalomaniacs need apply.”

Had I written this, it might not be quite so pithy, but it also would not contain the qualifier “in 2012.”

Brian J., as is his wont, offers this suggestion to NASA, totally free of charge:

If it’s planning on a Martian mission but it’s concerned about the conditions in small enclosed spaces for long periods of time and the effect on a person, NASA should just recruit young Manhattanites who might even pay for the privilege of doubling the size of their apartments to 300 square feet.

As I believe I’ve mentioned once before, my single-car garage measures out at 290 square feet. I don’t think I’d particularly want to live there. (It does have hot and cold running water, unless it’s below zero outside, but there’s only a small space heater.)

So after telling Mozilla to cram Firefoxes 4 through 7 inclusive, I finally broke down and installed version 8.0.1, mostly because the entreaties are becoming a bit louder and if they’re going to force it on me, as I suspect they would if they had half a chance, I want it done sometime other than late Sunday night.

For the moment, I’m giving it the not-too-coveted Doesn’t Entirely Suck award, since (1) it hasn’t actually crashed on me yet, something I couldn’t say of 3.6.N, where N=damn near anything, and (2) it appears to have something resembling speed on some of the more cluttered sites out there. (My speed-test site of late has been stay lovely, since I can count on it to load a couple of dozen animated GIFs and at least one audio file every time.)

On the downside, the right-click menu has been altered — “open in new tab” is now on top, rather than in second place, which I’ll have to get used to, and “view source” has disappeared from its usual spot in the menu, moving to Tools/Web Developer. (Ctrl-U also works, but both open a new window, and there are times when I’d rather have a tab.) Worse, at least in terms of my own specific usage pattern, is that the History dropdown (as opposed to the full-fledged box) allows neither new window nor new tab: you click on something in there and it overwrites your current tab. And the little search box, while it remains set to Wikipedia — there are several other sites built in, and others can be added — no longer offers autocompleted search suggestions. Still, it’s probably better than Chrome, if only because Google extends less of a hook into my data, though Chrome has apparently passed Firefox in the battle for second place in the Browser Wars, behind a certain Microsoft product which, says Bill Quick, demonstrates that “40% of global computer users are so tech-clueless they can’t install a better browser.”

But if Mozilla continues to screw around with Firefox for no good reason — well, Safari, so good.

Brenda Becker writes on Facebook:

Ah, compact fluorescents. The light bulb for when you want that MOODY effect when you flip a switch … slowly, the gloam spreads over the area as you stumble into your front hallway, relishing those achingly long seconds of darkness while the cat escapes, your elderly relative crashes, and you knock over a vase. Then there’s their ability to mysteriously destroy light fixtures — they’ve killed several of ours. And of course the long life span that justifies their average cost of $40 a bulb or something … why, we’ve had several that didn’t want us to get bored, and released themselves from this life after only weeks. But above all, there is … the glorious, bleached-bone, washed-out color of that eco-licious light. Even from outside, your rooms will have a nice, edgy, horror-movie vibe instead of that cliche’d, Thomas-Kinkaid welcoming glow of bad ol’ tungsten. BRING IT ON — I WANNA LOOK LIKE A ZOMBIE!

I think everyone who originally voted for it, regardless of party affiliation, should be awarded a single CFL — Colonic Fluorescent Lamp — curlicue type, to be administered rectally on C-Span with a twist of the wrist.

Man who lost both legs denied wheelchair until council can determine if his condition is permanent. That’s quite a stumper.

(Linked to this.)

Pop open a DVD these days, and something like this — which you can’t bypass — gets into your face:

And the guy who wrote the music didn’t get paid for it, either:

It all started back in 2006, when the Hollywood-funded anti-piracy group BREIN reportedly asked musician Melchior Rietveldt to compose music for an anti-piracy video. The video in question was to be shown at a local film festival, and under these strict conditions the composer accepted the job.

However, according to a report from Pownews the anti-piracy ad was recycled for various other purposes without the composer’s permission. When Rietveldt bought a Harry Potter DVD early 2007, he noticed that the campaign video with his music was on it. And this was no isolated incident.

The composer now claims that his work has been used on tens of millions of Dutch DVDs, without him receiving any compensation for it. According to Rietveldt’s financial advisor, the total sum in missed revenue amounts to at least a million euros ($1,300,000).

And that’s just from the Netherlands; this video clip has seemingly been shoehorned into DVDs from Kyrgyzstan to Kashmir. There’s nothing to connect BREIN itself to the, um, piracy, but somebody stuck it to Rietveldt.

Laws against that sort of thing? Of course. But look what happened when the composer sought help from his performing-rights agency:

Soon after he discovered the unauthorized distribution of his music Rietveldt alerted the local music royalty collecting agency Buma/Stemra. The composer demanded compensation, but to his frustration he heard very little from Buma/Stemra and he certainly didn’t receive any royalties.

Earlier this year, however, a breakthrough seemed to loom on the horizon when Buma/Stemra board member Jochem Gerrits contacted the composer with an interesting proposal … the composer had to assign the track in question to the music publishing catalogue of Gerrits, who owns High Fashion Music. In addition to this, the music boss demanded 33% of all the money set to be recouped as a result of his efforts.

Which, if nothing else, demonstrates that watchers pretty much always have to be watched.

(Via this Bill Peschel tweet.)

Artie Wayne may have uncovered a big fat conspiracy:

After watching the VH1 Video Countdown this week I noticed an alarming trend. Four of the female divas in the top ten are a little overweight and three of them are using special optic effects to make them look slimmer. Britney Spears has gone to the extreme in her new video “Criminal,” and at times I thought I was watching Taylor Swift! Katy Perry uses the same thinning effect in “The One That Got Away,” and Adele uses it on “Someone Like You.”

[YouTube links added by me.]

I watched “Someone Like You,” and I don’t think it’s post-production finagling. Artifact of the lens, maybe: you can see some distortion around the edges here and there. And maybe it’s the shadowing that makes her look a little more gaunt than she did in “Chasing Pavements,” three years ago.

As for Britney, she’s gained and lost so many pounds over the years that I don’t think she actually has a default size anymore.

Still, Artie Wayne pays way more attention to these things than I do, so I am not about to dismiss his concerns out of hand. As he says: “I’ve seen candid paparazzi photos of them all.”

Oh, and the fourth, unprocessed diva? Kelly Clarkson.

Two years ago, the Obama administration slapped a stiff tariff on Chinese tires, a move that was viewed with some concern by the two remaining US-based tire manufacturers; one of them, Cooper, actually came out in opposition to the tariff, though you have to assume that this is because they have fresh new Chinese production facilities. (And don’t forget, China is now a bigger auto market than the US.)

The tariff is scheduled to expire in 2012, though it may be extended. Either way, I don’t expect to see any of these here at home:

In this case, I suspect, black is the new black. Though I admit I’d crack a smile if someone showed up with blue tires — especially if they were whitewalls.

Andrea Harris figures out Bella Swan’s motivation in the Twilight series:

The author wanted her heroine to be a “good” person so people would admire her, but she (the author) is neither a good writer or a person with more than the shallowest insight into human relations. Thus, she thinks that the way to show the goodness of her character is to make Bella “humble” and “unpretentious” and that the way to do that is to show how much Bella hates shallow, ostentatious things like parties, expensive cars, and people being nice to her. Really. Of course, the author wants it both ways, so she has the heroine take these things anyway, but makes sure that the heroine is not happy to receive them.

This may be why I don’t connect with the series premise: I may be humble, but I’m not particularly unpretentious. Nor am I, um, crepuscular.

On the other hand, some songs from the soundtracks of the various Twilight films have earned my attention, so at least there’s that. (Example: “Heavy in Your Arms” by Florence and the Machine, which runs under the closing credits of Eclipse.)

Tam watches footage of things that are happening to unsanctioned border-crossers in the American Southwest, and issues the following advice to those who would follow:

[W]hat I learned from all this is that hiking for days in the desert with just a couple gallon jugs of Gatorade between you and a really convincing Amenhotep IV impression is incredibly stupid and dangerous. You would think that this would be blindingly obvious, but apparently it’s not.

Reminds me, vaguely, of my brief sojourn in California, which necessitated a few automotive trips across the Mojave. (One does not simply walk into that part of San Bernardino County.) Behind the back seat were several jugs of engine coolant, one for me should it be necessary, and others to bail out stranded motorists for a small fee. (Miles from nowhere, Prestone sells quite well at twice what you’d pay at AutoZone, another example of supply and demand at its finest.)

A word-usage note from Patrick at Popehat, derived from his reading of Melville’s Moby-Dick:

I still don’t understand how, in the English language, “blast” became a euphemism for “damn,” a reference that struck me on my second reading. Moby-Dick, as do many others written before the 1960s, contains a wealth of “blasted” people, “blasted” ships, “blasted” storms, and “blasted” whales.

But, blast it all, while the people, the ships, the storms may be damned, the whales technically weren’t: they acquired their blastedness in a different manner altogether. Quoting Melville:

As we glided nearer, the stranger showed French colors from his peak; and by the eddying cloud of vulture sea-fowl that circled, and hovered, and swooped around him, it was plain that the whale alongside must be what the fishermen call a blasted whale, that is, a whale that has died unmolested on the sea, and so floated an unappropriated corpse. It may well be conceived, what an unsavory odor such a mass must exhale; worse than an Assyrian city in the plague, when the living are incompetent to bury the departed.

Then again, should you introduce some form of ignition to the gases rising from such an ex-whale, you’ll see all the damned blasts you could possibly want.

As to how “damned” and “blasted” became sort of synonyms, this is, I suspect, an artifact of shifting levels of word acceptability: one commenter cites “bloody,” a term once thought blasphemous in Britain, now almost innocuous, and wonders if the F-word will some day be similarly laundered.

There’s a fine line, they say, between Honored Tradition and mere habit, and on Monday mornings we straddle that line and hope for the best.

buy “evisceration fork”:  It’s normally supplied as a matched set with the knife. (There is no spoon.)

blue drive not green:  Neither is it yellow, nor red.

bottom of automotive food chain:  Um, a Yugo with a salvage title?

douchebags with nice cars:  Amazingly, they’re not any less douchey as a result.

e k gaylord saw a russian submarine in lake hefner:  Which probably turned out to be a car driven off the boat dock by some douchebag.

kc and the sunshine band soy tu hombre boogie:  That’s “I’m Your Boogie Man,” if you happen to be getting down to Chile tonight.

hype is the death of all sub-culture:  Well, it’s certainly taking its sweet time.

Dress code for national christmas tree lighting:  In general, don’t wear anything that’s flashier than the tree itself.

pursuit of awfulness:  Claimed in the Declaration of Dependence, endorsed by roughly half the population of late.

love can make you happy on you tube:  I’d settle for links that work most of the time.

are people from iowa stubborn:  Didn’t you just pump a couple of gallons of ethanol into your tank?

no wonder im broke.com:  Reserve this domain now for only $15,500.

are there alligators wandering around the neighborhood of 33455:  Southeast Florida? Probably not. They’d get mugged.

now i need a verse recalling pi:  Should I have saved this until installment #314, maybe?

When I was very young, I learned how to read with my head tilted at odd angles, the better to comprehend rows and rows of shelved library books. One that caught my eye Saturday was Women Composers of Classical Music, hanging out in 780.922, and I started running down my own internal list: Hildegard of Bingen, Fanny Mendelssohn, Clara Schumann, Germaine Tailleferre, Amy (Mrs. H. H. A.) Beach — and then I drew a blank.

So I had to pick up the book, by Mary McVicker [Jefferson, NC: McFarland and Company, 2011], which has over 300 biographies, sorted by time frame and then by location. Better yet, there’s an LP discography, since many (most?) of these composers are not yet represented on CD. And yes, a few more names I’d known popped up, often of women I’d thought of more as performers than as composers: Wanda Landowska was perhaps the most prominent.

Inevitably, it is mentioned that men had an easier time of gaining acceptance, but as McVicker notes:

“[A]t various times in various countries between 1550 and 1900 good economic times and somewhat better acceptance for their music have coincided, and there have been brief windows of opportunity and sunshine for women composers.”

Whether the window is more open today will likely be judged by the author of a similar collection a hundred years from now.

Automobile reports that the two “most overused words in our car reviews” in 2011 were “gorgeous” and “badass.”

The question of whether these two qualities overlap to any great extent is left as an exercise for the student.

You may have already noticed the Yahoo! search box, a piece of pure 1990s code that’s now sitting on the sidebar. Hardly anyone uses a search function from here, except me, for quick and dirty cross-referencing of past posts. WordPress has its own search function, but there are upwards of 8,000 pages here that aren’t in any way connected to WordPress, which will never be seen. So I’ve been relying on Google to serve up my local stuff.

Then this weekend, Google informed me that they were de-indexing the entire site for a minimum of one year, as punishment for not blocking injections of malware quickly enough, or something. (One such event is described here.) Their own malware tool doesn’t find anything here, but the Master Control Program will not be denied.

I filed for reconsideration, which may or may not work. In the meantime, traffic here will drop by a third, which doesn’t bother me a great deal, and search traffic will drop by two thirds, which does, since it means I’ll probably have to suspend the search-query roundup on Monday mornings for lack of material.

Google Reader subscribers should not be affected. People who have ridiculous work filters and get here by typing the name of the domain into the Google search page will no longer be getting here.

Update: On the basis that I can’t assume I found everything myself, I have called in a white-hat guy to look over the site and make recommendations.

I mentioned yesterday that Google’s available tool for checking malware didn’t find anything here. However, there are tools, and then there are tools, if you know what I mean, and Google has a better one: it allows you to browse a page as though you were the Googlebot, and see what it sees. What it sees, frankly, is not pretty.

So I called for backup — specifically, these guys. While I was deleting several hundred files, most of them innocuous but you can’t be sure, they were attending to the stuff I couldn’t reach very well. (You do not want to see me working phpMyAdmin; it’s like Dane Cook lecturing on quantum mechanics.) They have pronounced the place thoroughly scoured, and will monitor for changes. When Google comes back, which eventually they will, they will be presented with something that doesn’t insult the integrity of their database, or whatever the current explanation is.

We now return you to your semi-regular bloggage.

About half a century ago, Gerry Goffin and Carole King came up with “Go Away Little Girl,” a song perhaps as morally complicated as their earlier “Will You Love Me Tomorrow”: the guy is having to say no to jailbait, after all. Which makes Donny Osmond’s version from 1971, when he was all of thirteen, seem a bit off-center, though Donny was utterly unironic in his delivery and managed somehow to pull it off. You won’t see Justin Bieber trying a song like this. (And Donny, to his eternal credit, has never disowned the song.)

The premise would resurface a few times: see, for instance, “Young Girl” by Gary Puckett and the Union Gap. I’m not sure how young these girls really are, though Chuck Berry can be heard practically licking his chops at “Sweet Little Sixteen.” (Or, for that matter, “Little Queenie,” who’s “too cute to be a minute over seventeen.”) The Beatles opted for seventeen — you know what I mean? — as did, um, Joan Jett. Steely Dan apparently drew the line at 19. Later on, we’d hear from Weezer (“there’s rules about old goats like me hangin’ ’round with chicks like you”).

Women, Joan Jett aside, were not usually concerned with this issue, though there were a couple of instances where the younger guy coveted the older woman — see, for example, Paul Anka’s “Diana” (“I’m so young and you’re so old”), or, stretching it a bit, Van Halen’s “Hot for Teacher.”

Girls crushing on the older guy? Well, yeah, now and then. The most obvious case: the Poni-Tails with “Born Too Late” (“To you, I’m just a kid that you won’t date”). But the most heart-wrenching song of this sort, as least to the extent that my heart is subjected to torque, is right here:

I have, of course, mentioned this before:

“Wait For Me”, a smallish (#37 in Billboard) hit for the Playmates in 1960 — you may remember them for “Beep Beep,” the tale of a Cadillac driver’s scorn for a little Nash Rambler, a couple years earlier — is basically the logical extension of the Poni-Tails’ yearnfest “Born Too Late”, this time told from the guy’s point of view: he looks upon this young girl as mostly a pest, and by the time it dawns on him that maybe she was The One, she’s already spoken for. The song (by Lee Pockriss and Paul Vance, whose biggest hit that year was Brian Hyland’s straight-faced reading of “Itsy Bitsy Teenie Weenie Yellow Polka Dot Bikini”) isn’t exactly on par with the saga of Abelard and Heloise, but it left me with a case of the shivers. Not that anything like this has ever happened to me, of course.

What prompted all this: “Wait For Me” coming up in the shuffle, and the death of Lee Pockriss a couple weeks ago. And maybe some other things I’d just as soon not go into.

But for now, please note that the perpetrator is in fact described as male:

Then again, the article doesn’t specify the guy’s hair color.

(Found at Criggo, which has several of these every day.)

Bananas don’t grow around here no matter what the weather’s like, and there’s a lot of work involved in getting five or six of them to me every single week:

[I]n order to be a global commodity rather than a tropical treat, the banana has to be harvested and transported while completely unripe. Bananas are cut while green, hard, and immature, washed in cool water (both to begin removing field heat and to stop them from leaking their natural latex), and then held at 56 degrees — originally in a refrigerated steamship; today, in a refrigerated container — until they reach their country of consumption weeks later.

And then they’re ripened in a controlled environment until they reach whatever state is desired by vendors:

Since my usual routine is to polish off a single banana each day after work, I shop on Saturdays for bananas in the 3-4 range, expecting that Monday’s fruit will have made it nearly to 5. By the end of the week, I’m seeing solid 7s.

Of late, they’re ridiculously cheap: 50 cents a pound or thereabouts. I pay extra for the organics when they’re offered, since they seem to ripen a bit more slowly and carefully.

And because I can’t resist, here’s the late Harry Chapin describing what happened to several tons of them one day in the not-so-distant past.

(From the sidebar at American Digest.)

As complaints about the Bowl Championship Series go, this is one of the better ones, based purely upon my opinion:

175 university elitists (the human voters) determine what 100 million consumers have to consume, and do everything possible to insulate themselves from feedback on their decisions. This is close to the ratio of the Politburo of the old Soviet Union versus the population of the USSR. These elitists suffer no consequences if they are caught taking bribes for votes and are thus easily corruptible (much like the Politburo), especially with all the money the SEC and ESPN have available to corrupt those voters.

Now remember what the NCAA says: it’s only corruption if the students get money.

College football is only one of two competitive systems who use opinion to determine a champion. The other? BEAUTY PAGEANTS. Both use little to no objective data to determine a winner, and both are rife with bribery for the “judges” so that power players get to earn and keep undeserved prizes.

Real athletes settle it on the field.

Anyone for a Miss Universe cage match?

Addendum: You know who else isn’t impressed by the BCS?

Mr. and Mrs. Porretto engage in some conversation:

CSO: She gave a quiz in one of her Earth Sciences classes, and for one of the questions, one student wrote: “I don’t know the answer, but here’s a bunny.”

FWP: And drew a sketch of a bunny?

CSO: Yup.

This of course harks back to the classic Bunny Meme:

Oolong, the original bunny in this meme, passed away in 2003, aged eight and a half, although his memory is honored by younger bunnies, other species, and college professors.

Nothing too unusual about this: high-school student writes to 150 men and women of letters, with four questions about symbolism and their use (or nonuse) thereof.

Except that it happened in 1963, well before email, and the surveys were mimeographed and mailed out. And this is what Bruce McAllister had in mind:

McAllister had just published his first story, “The Faces Outside,” in both IF magazine and Simon and Schuster’s 1964 roundup of the best science fiction of the year. Confident, if not downright cocky, he thought the surveys could settle a conflict with his English teacher by proving that symbols weren’t lying beneath the texts they read like buried treasure awaiting discovery.

Seventy-five of the authors queried did reply, and 65 of the replies survive:

The answers to the questionnaire were as varied as the writers themselves. Did Isaac Asimov plant symbolism in his work? “Consciously? Heavens, no! Unconsciously? How can one avoid it?” Iris Murdoch sagely advises that “there is much more symbolism in ordinary life than some critics seem to realize.” Ayn Rand wins the prize for concision; addressing McAllister’s example of symbolism in The Scarlet Letter, she wrote, “This is not a definition, it is not true — and, therefore, your questions do not make sense.” [Jack] Kerouac is a close second; he writes, “Symbolism is alright in ‘Fiction’ but I tell true life stories simply about what happened to people I knew.” The apologies Bruce received from secretaries — including those of John Steinbeck, Muriel Spark, and Ian Fleming— explaining that they were traveling and unable to respond were longer than that.

Oh, and McAllister did make a career of it. His 1987 novelette “Dream Baby,” published in Asimov’s and later expanded into a novel, was nominated for both the Hugo and Nebula Awards; he’s now a writing coach.

For an alleged communications company, this is not exactly what anyone would call communication:

Clicking on “LOG IN” on your start page really ought to take me to, you know, a login window or summat, instead of doing nothing at all, leaving me to flounder cluelessly until I find a page with specific logins for each and every kind of service and package you offer (Wireless. Home Phone. DSL. TV. Home phone and Internet. Wireless and cable but not Wireless Cable. Wireless and home phone, no Internet, Cable on Sundays only. Wireless Teletext with simultaneous translation to and from Lithuanian.

Been there, wandered through that. It’s as though they commanded the designer: “We want you to make this exactly like our voicemail, only in pictures.”

It gets harder, so to speak, to defend Medicare when stuff like this is going on:

According to data collected by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), Medicare has spent more than $240 million of taxpayer money on penis pumps for elderly men over the past decade, and will surpass a quarter of a billion dollars this year for costs since 2001.

The cost to taxpayers for the pumps more than quadrupled during that period, from a low of $11 million in 2001 to a high of more than $47 million in 2010. And these represent only the costs for external devices, technically classified as “Male Vacuum Erection Systems,” not implantable devices or oral drugs.

Of course, if you’re a judge, you can afford your own.

Approximately half the population can’t ever qualify for this sort of thing for the obvious biological reason. (Actually, more than that, since women tend to live longer than men.) Me, I’m inclined to agree with this woman:

Our government, which couldn’t find a single taxpayer funded program we couldn’t live without, subsequently cut a huge check to a bunch of dudes who feel their penises are too small. Dudes on Medicare. Because, goddam it, if they aren’t entitled to giant junk just for paying into the system for fifty years. But don’t touch the program because, if you do, seniors are going to be thrown off cliffs in droves or something.

I suppose they can always trot out a poster geezer for erectile dysfunction, the sort of guy who’d threaten to throw himself off a cliff if he couldn’t stand at attention. I wish him a nice trip.

Because I needed to do something with it, here’s a shot of tennis star Maria Sharapova at the introduction of — yes, I had to look it up — the 2007 Land Rover Freelander 2:

In the States, this model is known as the LR2, and was not sold here until 2008. Maria, then an “official Land Rover ambassador” in North America, has been a fan of the brand:

“I drive a Land Rover at my home in the USA. Since I was 15 and first saw Land Rovers in the US I have admired their unique design and British-ness.”

I wonder what she thinks of the new Range Rover Evoque, a cute ute with LR guts and Victoria Beckham behind it.

This is the only Icelandic pop record I’ve ever heard that wasn’t by Björk, and unlike some of Björk’s stuff, this is set to, as Tom Lehrer might say, a possibly recognizable tune. (Still picture throughout.)

How I stumbled across this is yet another particle of the Stuff of Legend; I had eight or nine tabs open, and a reference to it was on the bottom of one of the pages. I wouldn’t have spotted it had I not been so lacking in dexterity, mouse-handling-wise.

We have here Teija Vesterbacka, wife to Rovio head Peter Vesterbacka, in a dress that commemorates the company’s most popular product:

Which may or may not have something to do with this:

Rovio is about to open the world’s first official Angry Birds retail shop in Helsinki.

Hello Kitty, watch your back.

(Via this Nancy Friedman tweet. Photo by Matti Matikainen.)

Robert Stacy McCain had to stay over the night before last in Washington, and getting there was decidedly less than half the fun:

Raining cats, dogs and other small mammals in the D.C. area today. This means traffic was even worse of a mess than usual. Washington is full of people who can’t drive worth crap on a clear sunny day, and a rainstorm is an almost insuperable challenge for these incompetent vehicular menaces. The District of Columbia is the only place in America where they offer the driver’s exam in braille, and the laws against “discrimination” are so stringent in Washington that it’s considered a human-rights violation to deny a license to the mentally handicapped.

Just once in my life, I’d like to hear someone argue that “the drivers where I live are just fine, thank you very much.”

Or anyway, I would be, if I knew what the hell it was:

I know that sometimes in a rice dish there’s supposedly “saffron”. Like, “rice, with saffron”. What I would not be able to explain is why. Does “saffron” taste like something? What? Why would you add it to rice? What does it look like before you’ve added it? Does it come in a stick, a jar, powder? Can there be too much “saffron”? Not enough? At the risk of embarrassment let me lay it all on the table and state that these are all complete mysteries to me.

Well, one thing is for certain, there’s not a lot of it in a rice dish: at retail, saffron sells for somewhere upward of a thousand dollars a pound. (I actually found some in the McCormick spice rack at the supermarket once: it was ten bucks for a sixteenth of an ounce. A trip around the Web suggests it’s up to $17 or so now.)

Then again, if you live where the climate is appropriate, you can always grow your own.

These days, the most popular car color is white; in North America, 20 percent of 2011 cars were painted white. Which probably explains this:

I remember my car, in general. That is, I know it is white, four-door, has a sun roof and a spoiler and a rubber antenna. I just don’t know what it looks like. So the other day I walked up to a car that looked pretty much like mine, clicked the unlock button, and it didn’t light up. I got in anyway and noted with pleasure that it was cleaner than I had remembered. Then I looked at the dashboard and discovered that it was a Toyota. I had gotten into the wrong car! I quickly exited. Why does everyone have white cars anyway? What’s up with that?

I have no idea. Then again, I have a white car — Aspen White Pearl, says Nissan — with a sun roof and a spoiler, but no rubber antenna.