If you ask me just how it is I came to pick this particular set of candidates, and some of you might, I might just refer you to The Caustic Tart:

I haven't yet resorted to flipping a coin, but I'm not entirely ruling it out either.

No goblins this year, though someone felt compelled to call me on the landline at 5:46, 5:48 and 5:51 am, which I suppose qualifies as a trick: it certainly wasn't anything resembling a treat.

Incidentally, I must object to the characterization of these minimal packages as "Fun Size"; no way is there enough in any one of them to qualify as Fun.

News Item: Iran has said it would offer cash incentives to travel agencies to encourage Western tourists to visit the country, giving a premium for Americans, the official Islamic Republic News Agency reported Tuesday. The proposal is Iran's latest bid to reach out to ordinary Americans in an attempt by the Islamic Republic's political leadership to show that its quarrel is with the U.S. administration — not U.S. citizens.

The old American Embassy will hold 66 persons, more or less indefinitely.

(Via Francis W. Porretto.)

Oklahoma City is looking for an Urban Design Consultant.

More specifically:

The beginning of wisdom is the point where you realize you don't know everything.

Reprinted from Valentine's Day:

This sort of additive protection, as it were, does not work on PCs. After reviewing some of the more questionable decisions made by our end users, we have determined that the efficiency of one's antivirus protection varies inversely with the square of the number of antivirus products installed on any one box.

In other words, if you have two AV programs running, you have one-fourth the protection; three of them, one-ninth. (Spyware detectors and such interact differently, and cannot be so easily quantified.)

And no, you don't want to know how many we found on [description of machine redacted].

Construction on the Great Wall of China began around the year 215 B.C.

If you grew up in the South, you might recognize "B.C." as the brand name of a headache powder. Kehaar is having aches and pains of his own, but it hasn't stopped him from bringing you Carnival of the Vanities #215, the first (and still the oldest) of the blog compilations, awaiting your inspection as soon as you break away from this place.

Yesterday was all GOP; today the Democrats drop in.

• A card with a photo of all the statewide Democratic candidates, with the tag "Experienced Leaders You Can Trust." Brad Henry's in the middle; the tall guys at the ends are Cody Graves and Lloyd Fields.

• A letter from Dana Orwig, addressed to "Dear Neighbor," complains about Trebor Worthen's "misleading and untrue allegations," and says, "In view of the trend of Mr Worthen's mailings, I suspect his campaign has further plans to 'go negative'." (I've mentioned this tendency before.)
  

See the wire? That's what we're down to.

Then again, I had a good excuse: dinner date. We hit the Elephant Bar east of Penn Square. No political implications, and the food was pretty decent: I had the misoyaki pork loin, she had something called the Shrimp Adventure Platter. I never thought of shrimp having adventures, but maybe that's just me.

Meanwhile, the Hornets began the regular season with a W: 91-87 over the Celtics in Boston, and from a cursory look at the box score, I have to assume that it wasn't pretty. Still, it's a win, and I'll take it.

Leo Kottke, guitarist extraordinaire, has also been known to sing, but he's not fond of his voice: it sounds, he said, like "geese farts on a muggy day."

Which brings us to the lovely Gwendolyn, who, after a cold start, emits a flatulent-goose sound of her own. I took this description to the Infiniti store, where they told me that it's the starter getting old and (un)cranky, and so long as the car actually starts, I shouldn't worry about it. "I've heard them go two, three years like that," said the service manager. And, well, cold starts are going to be more common, what with November being here, so I suppose I should get used to the noise. I have about half a dozen Leo Kottke albums; maybe I'll copy them to CD and listen to them during the warmup.

There's just no way I can pass up linking to a piece which includes "How to Meet Naked Montanans" in its title.

Especially, you know, since otherwise normal people are trying to persuade me that Montana sucks.

(Inspired, if that's the word, by this Fark thread.)

And they didn't get one, either:

Back in the day when General Motors was struggling to keep its market share below 50 percent, dentists and lawyers and such, even if they could afford Cadillacs, tended to buy Buicks and Oldsmobiles, lest their clientele wonder if maybe they might be getting overcharged. The idea that there's historical precedent for this sort of modesty is just this side of fascinating.

This is not to say, though, that the dentists weren't protective of what was theirs:

It could have been worse: the curse could have included root-canal work.

(Stolen from Scribal Terror.)

Susan B., this past Sunday:

The individual in question arrived here today with the same screed. I read it over, was planning to approve it, then remembered where I heard the name.

I read it again. It's medium-grade moonbattery, but that's not quite enough, in my view, to warrant junking the comment. I've approved worse. (I daresay I've written worse.)

Then I pulled a phrase out of the middle of it and sent it to Google, and discovered at least four places where the entire screed has already been enshrined, indicating that it's hardly needed here; it's a traveling text dump, nothing more.

So I've decided on this incredibly sub-Solomonic compromise: I won't post it here, but I'll put up a link to a place where it's already up, and you can read it for yourself if you so desire.

One oversized card today, on behalf of Jim Roth, asserting that he "has made Oklahoma County safer," a reference to road and bridge improvements in District 1.

Overall, I think I've gotten more mail from the Roth campaign than from any other this year.

There's a scene in Bill Forsyth's Gregory's Girl that's always stuck with me. It appears that someone has it bad for Gregory's younger sister; in fact, the someone in question says admiringly, "She's only ten, but she has the body of a woman of thirteen."

At the time, this seemed innocent and goofy. Twenty-five years later, it sounds like a warning shot: somewhere between then and now it became de rigueur to turn tween girls into oversexed Bratz. A week doesn't go by that I don't get some Googler looking for risqué photos — even fake risqué photos — of twelve-year-old Dakota Fanning. One could argue, I suppose, that I don't deal well with female sexuality of any sort, and maybe that's even true, but I can't see any upside to having middle-school students looking like tired call girls.

Enter Up Stream Girl, which aims to be the anti-Abercrombie and/or Fitch:

And surely there has to be a middle ground between the burqa and the "Who needs brains when I've got these?" T-shirts.

(Discovered here.)

Life in Erica's world:

"Cumbersome" is putting it mildly. So why not this?

Yeah, it might be a pain in the tuchas to set up — once — but if people's time is worth anything at all, and surely it is, the return on investment should be considerable.

(Why, yes, I do use Lotus Notes. How did you guess?)

Zimmerman wasn't exactly wroth, but he was definitely perplexed. He didn't mind so much when somebody called "Bobby the Poet" put out a Hardly-Worthit version of "Positively White Christmas" or something like that, and he admitted to a guffaw or two when that Weird Al guy ran backwards and forwards at the same time. In the same song, yet.

But he didn't quite know what to make of Chastity Rome-Sick Blues. Okay, the girl was way cute, if a tad fumble-fingered, and she looked the part. (Johanna? Forget those visions.) Besides, whoever heard of a music video made to promote a book? He shook his head in amazement and pressed the Watch Again button. "Funny," he finally said. "And it beats the hell out of watching parking meters."

Neil Kramer reads Cosmopolitan so you don't have to, and finds stuff like this:

The hottest woman I ever met had a Ph.D. in medieval French literature or some such thing. And you know what? Not once did it ever occur to me that she might be able to correct my misapprehensions (if any) about Molière's Tartuffe, nor would it have bothered me greatly if she had.

I suspect Neilochka is dipping into the Double Secret Irony stash for this:

Either that, or he's letting the wang do the talking again.

Now if you'll excuse me, Michel Houellebecq awaits.

In the waning days, it's a GOP blitz. Here's what showed up today:

• A Trebor Worthen trifecta: three items from the Republican State Leadership Committee, all touting Worthen's tax stances — and all citing the same bill: HB 1172, which scissored the top end of the income tax and repealed the estate tax. The RSLC's mailer, Targeted Creative Communications, Inc., has yet to figure out that there have been three owners of this house since the one to which these items were addressed.

• Another RSLC card, magazine-sized: "Oklahoma State House Republicans: They did what they said they would do." See the previous item for address concerns.

• Two cards from Cliff Branan in what appears to be somebody's handwriting. (If it's a font, it's a good one; seldom do any two iterations of the same letter look alike.) One of these is actually addressed to me.
  

Question to the readership: Should I include items which due to mail delays didn't show up until Election Day or after? Or should I knock this off after Monday evening?

I am now prepared to argue that the Hornets have learned to play defense. The Bees picked up a startling 53 rebounds, led by Tyson Chandler with 15. (And after fouling out in the first game, Chandler was cooler tonight, getting called only twice.) And there was offense: five Hornets in double figures. There was just the faintest hint of Third-Quarter Drought™, but a 12-2 run at the beginning of the fourth put the Hornets back in front to stay, spoiling the Pacers' opening night in Indianapolis, 100-91.

Thirty-nine of those 100 points (and 19 of those boards) came from the bench, another indication that maybe this team actually has depth. And since Peja isn't hitting the 3-ball — he's 2-9 so far this year — it's a good thing that Rasual Butler can still drain the occasional trey. (He had two tonight in the fourth quarter.)

And there's this: against the Celtics last year, the Bees were 0-2; against the Pacers, 0-2. Personnel changes or no, I have to believe that there was some sense of payback out there. Moreover, last year's Hornets won only 14 road games all season. Getting two early has to be gratifying.

Having ruined opening night for two teams now, the Hornets will have two opening nights of their own: Sunday in New Orleans against the Rockets, and Tuesday at the Ford Center against the Warriors.

It does, however, meet the part of the definition that calls for a dream that makes you sit up and take notice, so I'll mention it here.

I'm on the periphery of a popular local eatery/takeout joint when I pick up on the crowd buzz, and what I'm picking up is implausible in the extreme: they've set up separate entrances marked "Straight" and "Gay." Shades of the Southern South, I'm thinking, and what the hell for?

On an impulse, I went in through the "Gay" entrance and noticed that no one was checking credentials, assuming such a thing were possible. I walked over to the "Straight" entrance: nobody watching that door either.

And the crowd seemed about twice as big as usual, so obviously the artificial constraints, or whatever they were, weren't discouraging customers.

I'm still puzzling over what, if anything, I am to make of this brief tale, except to note that people of any description have little use for attempts to pigeonhole them.

I question the timing. About five months after Sandy and Bambi fought to the death on a lonesome Oklahoma two-lane, the Oklahoman comes up with a piece on deer/auto collisions.

Things I didn't know:

• October and November are the prime months for such things around here, inasmuch as it's mating season.

• Nationwide there are about 1.5 million accidents involving deer, resulting in $1.1 billion in damage. (This works out to $733 per incident, a figure at which I wince: my insurance adjuster told me they just stopped counting at six thousand.)

• So-called "deer whistles," which are supposed to repel the critters, don't.
  

I may buy one of those whistles anyway, since friends swear by them; but I'll pass it off as a tiger whistle.

"But there aren't any tigers for ten thousand miles!"

"See how well it works?"

It's yet another GOP blitz, with basically the same mailing issues they've had before (see prior installments), and these items fall into three general categories:

• Cliff Branan (positive): "Why We Believe Cliff Branan is a Great State Senator," with paragraphs by seemingly everybody from David Boren to the owners of Bennett's Decal and Label. Two copies received.

• Trebor Worthen (positive): A handwritten card similar to the one I got from Branan yesterday. I don't think the text was machine-generated, and I note in passing that Worthen's penmanship is worse than Branan's, though still far better than mine.

• Trebor Worthen (negative): This was the first look I've had at the "misleading and untrue allegations" Dana Orwig says Worthen has made. The most obvious problem with the list is that Worthen provides a source for only one of four alleged Orwig statements, and makes an unwarranted extrapolation from that one: one's position on medical marijuana is not an infallible indication of one's position on other proscribed drugs. (And that source, incidentally, is the 2006 Libertarian Candidate Survey, which Worthen apparently couldn't be bothered to take himself.)
  

On these mailing matters: Assuming that these addresses are obtained from voter-registration records of some sort, I'm wondering if maybe Mrs T (not her real initial), who lived here until 1997 or so, is still listed on the rolls at this address. Maybe I'll ask a staffer at the polling place on Tuesday if she's still in the book. (Better yet, maybe I'll ask Don Danz to come down and vote on her behalf.)

Addendum, 1 pm: As the block captain for the Neighborhood Association, I deliver the monthly newsletter on my block, and as I made the rounds today, I noticed a couple of flyers that had beaten me to the front doors. Here's what I found:

• A card with Dana Orwig's photo and a sticker giving the location of the polling place.

• A pair of sheets from Dave Mehlhaff, the larger of which complains that Jim Roth is getting outside-the-area contributions from the Victory Fund, a national GLBT PAC, and plays the by-now-dogeared "radical homosexual agenda" card. The Fund is indeed taking contributions for Roth; as for the "agenda," well, I attended the United States Holocaust Museum's traveling exhibit of gay and lesbian Holocaust victims, which Roth helped to bring here, and which Mehlhaff presumably would have preferred to be kept under wraps.
  

I have one concern: that people will come home, find all this stuff on their doors, and suspect they are in some way connected. They aren't. Orwig and Mehlhaff are political opposites; what's more, the Mayfair Heights Neighborhood Association has endorsed no candidates for office, and the arrival of its newsletter on this date was timed to remind residents of the monthly meeting Tuesday night, at which Ward 2 Councilman Sam Bowman (not up for reelection this year) will speak.

Venomous Kate is looking for the 50 Most Depressing Songs, apparently to inspire her upcoming novel. Please feel free to make recommendations to her.

I suggested Jimmy Ruffin's "What Becomes of the Brokenhearted," which is a world-class downer, but I didn't mention this: at one time the song contained a spoken-word intro which was perhaps intended to set the mood, but which didn't make it into the version released to the general public. After listening to it, I don't miss it at all:

Somebody, maybe Berry Gordy himself, heard that and thought it was just too much.

This isn't quite an isolated incident: right before the last verse of the Shangri-Las' heartrending "I Can Never Go Home Anymore," at about the 2:30 point, Mary Weiss originally half-cried, half-whispered, "Listen, I'm not finished." The line was mixed out of the 45 and wasn't heard again for decades. (And this, too, is a Depressing Song, what with mother dying and runaway daughter contrite.)

Still, if we want Serious Discomfort in a pop tune, we call upon King Crimson, which in its first two albums was wont to work up implausible titles like "'Epitaph' including 'March for No Reason' and 'Tomorrow and Tomorrow'," from which we extract this example of finely-crafted angst:

This might be laughable were it not so perfectly orchestrated: the song (which runs over eight and a half minutes, with only one more verse and a repeat of the verse/chorus above) is carefully calculated to resonate against your last nerve, making seemingly-adolescent rubbish into a true Tale of Terror.

(Lyricist Pete Sinfield, incidentally, is responsible for the unofficial name of my workplace, but that's another tale of terror story.)

And the Princess of Darkness and the SpiderLad mean business. (Ages: Laney, 3½; Jackson, 8 months; furnishings in the background, God only knows.)

Each issue of The Week has a section called "Good Week For..." and "Bad Week For...", usually with four of each.

This is apparently a Bad Week for Men, and here's why:

Finally, I'm above average at something.

Kent Hovind, evangelist and proprietor of Pensacola's Dinosaur Adventure Land creationist theme park, is facing 288 years in prison after conviction on 58 counts of tax fraud.

Hovind and his wife Jo, who could draw up to 225 years, had argued that they were working for God and that therefore their earnings, and those of their employees, were not subject to taxation. The park itself was closed in April because it had been built without a permit and because Escambia County authorities had never been allowed to inspect the premises. "Right now Caesar demands a building permit," quipped Mike Whitehead, chair of the County Commission.

Sentencing will be on the 9th of January.

(Via Secular Blasphemy.)

Paul Mauriat, the orchestra leader whose 1968 recording of "Love Is Blue" is, to these ears, the second-best French instrumental ever, has died in Perpignan, in southern France near the Spanish border.

Born in Marseille in 1925, Mauriat led his own band during the 1940s, subsequently working with Charles Aznavour and honing his own reputation as a classical pianist. Maintenance of that reputation perhaps led him to release his pop records, starting in 1957, under various pseudonyms; in 1962, as "Del Roma," he got his first hit as a composer, cowriting (with Franck Pourcel and lyricist Jacques Plante) "Chariot," a massive hit for Petula Clark. (The next year, an English-language version was a smash in the US for Little Peggy March, under the title "I Will Follow Him.")

You might figure from that particular example that Mauriat was an exponent of strong melodies, and let the words come in where they will, and you'd be correct. Pierre Cour's lyrics to "L'Amour est Bleu," first sung by Vicky Leandros at the 1967 Eurovision Song Contest — it placed fourth — were clearly secondary to André Popp's music, and when Mauriat recorded it in 1968, he cast it as a sort of neo-Baroque string piece with harpsichord accents. It sold zillions on the Continent and (as Philips 40495) made #1 in the States, the fifth-biggest instrumental, as Casey Kasem says, of the Rock Era. I'm on my third copy of the single.

Starting with Blooming Hits, the LP containing "Love Is Blue," the next few Mauriat album covers, at least in the US, could be described as Blatantly Sexy, peaking with the late-'68 Mauriat Magic, which produced two minor singles: "Même si tu revenais," otherwise known as "Love in Every Room," and a version of John Phillips' "San Francisco," which you remember with Scott McKenzie advising you to wear some flowers in your hair.

Mauriat also built a name for himself in the Far East, signing with the Japanese Pony Canyon label in 1994 and touring in Japan as late as 1998. His orchestra, still bearing his name, continues to perform. "Love Is Blue," to my knowledge, has never gone out of print, and Blooming Hits was just reissued on CD by Collectors' Choice Music.

And that first-best French instrumental? Right here.

GMO Urban Ministries is an offshoot of Greater Mount Olive Baptist Church on Oklahoma City's largely-black northeast side. They've scheduled five public forums through the next year in an effort to "reconnect and revitalize" the black community. The first of them was Saturday, at which OU Black Studies instructor Kevin McPherson laid it on the line:

Okay, there's just a hint of Distrust Whitey in there, and it's not like I've haven't heard it before. Cue the Temptations' single "Ball of Confusion," as they rattle off sound bites from the incessant media blitz, and pick up on Eddie Kendricks: "Vote for me and I'll set you free!"

But I don't think Dr McPherson was baiting anyone, especially when you look at what he said in the context of, say, this:

Or this:

So jump a couple years forward in the soundtrack of the city, to the point where James Brown says "I don't want nobody to give me nothing / Open up the door, I'll get it myself." Abject declarations of white guilt, however well they may play on the nightly news, don't mean a thing to the Hardest Working Man in Show Business. And I suspect Kevin McPherson doesn't want to hear them either: there's work to be done.

A couple of years ago, with crude oil in the $52 range and my DeskJet at work demanding yet another ink cartridge, I sat down with a calculator and determined the price of HP ink per 42-gallon barrel. The results were predictable yet still amazing: $292,900, more than you'd pay for even Dom Perignon in this quantity.

Gizmodo is now reporting that HP ink costs even more than human blood: 71 cents per milliliter for the contents of an HP 45 cartridge, versus 40 cents for the claret, Barrett.

And actually, it's worse than they say, because they're comparing with the 45, a relatively old unit (I use them in my ancient 720C at home) that has less-predatory pricing than newer models. My work box takes the HP 56, which holds a mere 19 ml (versus 42 for the 45) and costs even more than $30. So 42nd and Treadmill has to fork over, not $0.71/ml, but $1.84.

Does this mean that nothing on earth costs more than HP ink? No, it does not.

(Observed at Scribal Terror.)

I've already posted my endorsements, such as they are; regular readers may have ascertained the level of enthusiasm from the context, and have certainly noticed that I didn't mention any party connections.

So here's the Shorter Version, with party designation included, and 1 through 5 to indicate the firmness of my support. (Something about which I don't care in the slightest would score zero, but then it wouldn't get an endorsement, would it?)

5th Congressional District: David Hunter (D) (3)
Governor: Brad Henry (D) (4)
Lieutenant Governor: Jari Askins (D) (4)
Corporation Commission: Bob Anthony (R) (5)
Treasurer: Scott Meacham (D) (3)
Labor Commissioner: Brenda Reneau (R) (3)
Attorney General: Drew Edmondson (D) (3)
Insurance Commissioner: Kim Holland (D) (4)
State Auditor: Jeff McMahan (D) (2)
District Attorney: David Prater (D) (2)
Senate 40: Cliff Branan (R) (4)
House 87: Dana Orwig (D) (4)
Assessor: Leonard Sullivan (R) (5)
District 1 Commisioner: Jim Roth (D) (5)

Of people not on my ballot, I like Andrew Rice (D, Senate 46), Fred Jordan (R, House 69), Jennifer Seal (D, House 85), Lance Cargill (R, House 96), John Trebilcock (R, House 98), and J. M. Branum (I, House 99).

State questions:
724: Yes (5)
725: Yes (1)
733: Yes (5)
734: Yes (4)

The revamped Houston Rockets are way better than they were last season, and the Hornets found that out early, falling behind in the first quarter, fighting back with a 16-2 run, and watching an 11-point lead evaporate in the second. But the Bees once again showed some serious D, and David West sank two free throws in the last five seconds to ice it, 96-90.

Chris Paul managed a double-double in the first half, scoring 10 and dishing 10 in 18 minutes; he wound up with 16 assists, tying a career high. Tyson Chandler swept 11 boards, and David West dropped in 22 points, raising his season average to an even 20. And Peja's mojo put in an appearance: Stojakovic hit five of eight treys. In fact, the Hornets shot better from beyond the arc (9 of 16, 56.3 percent) than from inside (33 of 70, 47.1 percent).

The Bees still can't hit consistently from the charity stripe: they improved markedly in the fourth quarter, yet still wound up at 60 percent. This is, notes Russ Eisenstein of the radio crew, only the second time the Hornets have started a season 3-0; they've never started 4-0. Will history be made this week? The Warriors will be coming to the Ford Center Tuesday, and it's probably not too much to hope that the Mavericks will thrash them the night before.

And the stranger they are, the more likely they are to be cut out of Site Meter's list and posted here.

switch bodies with Cameron Diaz:  Something tells me this isn't Roseanne Barr's wish list.

aesthetic classics/oldsmobile/vodka:  It would take roughly half a bottle of Ketel One to make a late-Seventies Cutlass look good.

how do magicians saw someone in half:  Traditionally, with a saw, though modern three-way slicing techniques call for large panel-like blades.

short hair ohio bats:  During lake-effect snows they flee to Kentucky.

did southern belles wear makeup?  You'd never know it if they did.

blocking spam from senders with jumbled consonants:  You mean "zvtbhqxl@npltzjh.qzw" isn't a real email address?

how to firm slackened labia:  Two parts alum, one part Summer's Eve.

konqueror coding error icon illuminati:  Did you run the fnord job?

biting beaver "male sexuality":  It is considered bad form actually to bite it.

is yogurt colored with crushed red beetles:  Well, not the plain varieties.

ursula andress concave:  I remember her as being delightfully convex.

microsoft allegory:  It ends with Bill Gates saying "640k ought to be enough for anyone."

women nude in back yard:  Not in my back yard. I checked.

maids that do more than clean in okc:  You can't afford them.

magical quatrain to have a big bombshell breasted sexy wife:  "O spirits and powers / Grant this unto me / Adjust her rack outwards / No smaller than C."

If you believe the Independent, this is what's going to happen:

Well, it certainly can't have been because of water; it hasn't rained in ten whole years.

The idea seemed sane enough: if we (by which I mean "they," since this didn't happen to me) actually had a car here, we could sell more car stereos, since shoppers would be able to hear the equipment in its proper environment.

A deal was struck with an automaker, and as the new store began to take shape, the contractor was called in to remove one of the pillars near the entrance so that the car could be moved into the store.

He declined, and of course store staff wanted to know why:

"You don't have a car."

Patiently the staff explained the deal with the automaker and how everything was supposed to go.

"But you don't have a car."

"It will be here soon."

"Uh, no, it won't. It's on the bottom of the ocean."

Last I heard, salvage operations were continuing.

Former Sinclair Broadcast Group vice-president Mark Hyman, who has been delivering daily commentaries on Sinclair stations' news broadcasts, is giving up his slot at the end of the month, saying that he's "exhausted" and wants "to focus more on family activities."

Hyman's "The Point" was a regular feature of Sinclair's NewsCentral offerings, and was regularly applauded and/or excoriated for its distinct right-wing flavor. (Modest excoriation here.)

Sinclair CEO David Smith said that "The Point" has "invoked thoughtful discussions on many topics and across all demographics."

My own take, from January 2004:

"The Point" airs locally on KOKH, a Fox affiliate.

No more of these, please:

• Anything of the form "A B, C [something that rhymes with B]"
  
• "But think about the children"
  
• "Speak[ing] truth to power"
  
• crescatsententia.org
  
• "Anna Nicole Smith," unless followed by "was found dead"
  
• Anything of the form "He was A before he was [something opposite to A]"
  
• "Rosario Dawson's dong"
  
• "It's the [noun], stupid"
  
• "Our exclusive poll"
  
• "I'm [name] and I approved this message"
  
• Anything containing the word "Federline"
  

I would be so grateful.

Addendum, 8 February 2007: I regret to note that Anna Nicole Smith was ... never mind, it's just plain mean. Kevin Federline, you may want to know, is still alive.

I suspect they'd sound like Deb:

Or, as Jim Hightower used to say, "If the gods had meant us to vote they would have given us candidates."

Update, Election Day: Jenn*fer rec*mmends th*s sh*rt.

Further update: This is probably what Deb means by holding one's nose.

These constitute last-ditch attempts, and truth be told, I wouldn't be surprised to find some of these in the last ditch in the next couple of days.

Anyway, here's what we have:

• An expanded version — with family photos, yet! — of basically the same Leonard Sullivan flyer received last week.

• A sort-of-amusing GOP flyer with a picture of a tombstone and the caption: "The Democrat Controlled State Senate. Where good bills go to die." Which may even be true, though some of the ones they cited didn't strike me as all that good, and a couple of them date all the way back to 2003, which is a long time to carry a grudge. (And, pace Dwayne, enough with the "pro-values" tag. If I ever am insane enough to run for office, I promise to run on an Anti-Values platform.)

• An actual phone call, which I did not answer and wouldn't have had I been here at the time it came in, from Sheriff John Whetsel, singing the praises of Jim Roth. It gets mentioned here because Whetsel was canny enough to make the entire spiel fit into the meager thirty seconds I allow on my machine.
  

The polls are open from 7 to 7 tomorrow. [Insert joke about "twelve-hour election" here.]

Yale Hollander lives in St Louis these days, but he remembers Oklahoma City; he studied law at OCU back in the early 1990s. He came back through for the first time this past week, and posted some observations, from which I excerpt the following and throw in some commentary of my own:

Barring the sudden disappearance of malefactors from the face of the earth, I don't see any huge upturn in air travel; I have never quite subscribed to the "If we build it, they will come" theory inasmuch as it applies to airports.

Full Circle, after starting out in what is now the Asian District, was actually on Western during the 1970s, in the old Veazey Drug. later VZD's. A fire at VZD's drove them out.

Two municipalities. Warr Acres has a strip of the Distressway, roughly 5400 to 6000.

I don't see this area improving much over the next few years, since right now its most distinctive characteristic is horrendous traffic, not exactly a selling point for anything New and/or Different.

Restaurants are spreading out away from Bricktown; I expect this trend to continue. And really, I envision Ruth's Chris somewhere along Western, in the manner of its Kansas City restaurant, which is on the Plaza, five miles south of downtown. Then again, I suspect we're not on their radar just yet.

I can go along with this, though I'd prefer a Houston's to another Cheesecake Factory; if you're going to pitch a restaurant as a destination, it's more plausible if you only have the one.

Retail, I suspect, is more likely to materialize on Automobile Alley (which I see as having Restaurant Row potential) or in the to-be-cleared area between old and new I-40 alignments.

According to the CHL, the Blazers averaged 7,154 for their first five home games, which is a little off pace: last year's season average was 8,609. (The Ford Center seats 18,036 for hockey, so it's usually going to be half empty, or half full, depending on your frame of reference.)

I'm firmly behind #1, though it will take some serious finagling to get such a measure through the Legislature. As for #2, we don't have much in the way of blue laws, so it's going to take some substantial increase in demand before the supply appears.

There's lots more in Mr Hollander's piece, which I suspect will be sliced and diced over at OKC Talk; inasmuch as there is almost no overlap between their readership and mine, I figured I'd post some of it here and see where the chips fall.

Well, okay, no, he wasn't really. But there's one parked outside his house.

(Probably not a LaSalle, though. Via Pop Culture Junk Mail.)

Mayor Cornett, some days back, tossed out the idea of renaming a couple of city streets for Vince Gill and Charlie Christian, and maybe a back alley in Bricktown for the Flaming Lips. The Oklahoman's Steve Lackmeyer has been getting mail on the subject, and apparently to his surprise, Lips fans worldwide have voiced their support for Flaming Lips Alley.

Lackmeyer notes:

The proposed Flaming Lips Alley runs between the BNSF tracks and Central Avenue Vince Gill Avenue in Bricktown. Right now, it's pretty much Dumpster City, though I suspect that a sudden influx of national attention might be enough to spark cleanup efforts.

Way back in 1997, in the blessed days of gridlock (in Vent #63, in fact), I said this:

You might think from this that we may as well drop the damned veil and be partisan, and when we do, we'll find that Sean Gleeson is already there:

I'm not entirely convinced it's a "drift"; I believe it was a deliberate move in an effort to — well, God only knows what they were thinking.

And really, Mr Gleeson's stance is no different from that of the classic yellow-dog Democrat, except for the party affiliation; if you're willing to complain about him, but not about them, you might want to see about having your Consistency Meter recalibrated.

What could persuade Sean Gleeson to vote for a Democrat? It would have to be a truly exceptional Democrat indeed, and even then it's not a certainty.

I arrived at the polling place at 4:55. No lines, really — two, maybe three people deep at the table at most — and no waiting for a booth. I cast ballot #993 for the precinct, and I wouldn't be surprised to hear that the pollwatchers had side bets on when they'd hit a thousand. Elapsed time: five minutes, twenty seconds, and yes, I did both sides of the ballot. Not too shabby, if I say so myself.

For those of you who aren't familiar with the Oklahoma voting system: you mark your ballot — a substantial piece of card stock — by filling in the center of an arrow pointing to the candidate or choice provided. You then take the ballot to an optical reader, which scans both sides as you slide it in, and flashes a green light if it finds no anomalies. If something's wrong, you get a red light, they hand it back to you, and if necessary give you a new ballot. A four-digit counter ticks over once for each good ballot. When the polls close at 7:00, the reader is disconnected, and the plastic box underneath it, where all the ballots have fallen, is sent, along with the appropriate register tape, to the county election board, which in turn is responsible for getting it to the state election board. Results are posted here starting at 7 pm and updated as new boxes are received. Seldom will you hear any horror stories about Oklahoma voting: it's fast, there's an actual paper trail, and it's relatively hard to screw up. In Presidential years there are longer lines, of course, but some people only come out every four years.

Well, the Mavericks didn't dispatch the Warriors last night as anticipated, and Golden State wasn't even tired when they showed up at the Ford Center: the Hornets opened up leads as wide as 15, but still found themselves behind by 1 with five minutes left. It's probably a good thing I missed this game; I don't know if my old heart could take this sort of thing. The Bees prevailed, 97-93, and it was a lot closer than that sounds.

Issues: the Third-Quarter Drought™ persists; the bench wasn't quite as effective this time around. The starters, though, shone, with all five in double figures and three pulling down double-doubles: Chris Paul dropped 22 and dished up 11 assists; David West picked up 16 points and 11 rebounds; Tyson Chandler scored 10 and grabbed 14 boards.

And who would have figured that one week into the season, there'd be only two undefeated teams — and the Hornets would be one of them? Not me.

Thursday, it's a rematch, and this time it's on Golden State's court.

Ward 2 Councilman Sam Bowman dropped into our Neighborhood Association meeting last night, and passed on some news of interest. Apparently they've shuffled a couple of jurisdictions at City Hall; used to be, Neighborhood Services could bust someone for high grass or weeds or debris in the front yard, but not for parking on the grass. This seemed like a dissipation of effort, so the Planning folks who were responsible for yard-parking complaints were moved over to Neighborhood Services, and now it's a one-stop shop; citations for parking in the yard doubled from the same month last year. That wasn't a major issue for me, but this is: NW 50th from Pennsylvania to May, one of the more wretched stretches of pavement in this town, will be scraped off and resurfaced in 2007.

One question that came up was the ongoing issue of city officials running for higher office while retaining their jobs. Mayor Cornett was mentioned, as was Ward 7's Willa Johnson. Nobody had anything good to say about it, but it's not illegal.

And I asked Bowman about Pete White's idea for increasing the Council to ten wards. Bowman pointed out, as White had, that the existing arrangement was perhaps insufficiently diverse, and suggested that it might be possible to redraw the lines to produce something resembling a majority-Hispanic ward and take some of the sheer vastness out of Pete White's Ward 4. There is, though, said Bowman, not much support for expanding the Council right now. If it's going to happen, I suspect it will be in 2011, after the new Census figures come out and they have to redraw the boundaries anyway.

Actually, it was a pretty good day to be an Oklahoma incumbent: of the statewide officeholders, only Labor Commissioner Brenda Reneau was sent packing. More interesting is the apparent 24-24 tie in the state Senate, in which case Lt. Governor-elect Jari Askins, a Democrat, will hold the balance of power. (Senator Nancy Riley, who switched to the Democrats earlier this year, might well congratulate herself on her prescience.) The GOP still holds the House, though.

All the State Questions passed, although the only one that was never in doubt was 724, which cuts off state pay to an officeholder in jail, and which passed with better than a 7-1 margin.

I've seen no recount requests yet. If there are no challenges, the State Election Board will certify the results (current totals here) next Wednesday.

All in all, I can't complain with any degree of conviction: most of the folks I voted for actually won, which is far better than my usual track record, and it looks like I can retire my Big Book of Thad Balkman Jokes.

(Oh, and my predictions? Not so close.)

And a lot of change it is, too: Oklahoma City Manager Jim Couch is getting a raise to $192,500 a year — which, for a person overseeing an annual budget upwards of $750 million, doesn't strike me as an enormous sum of money.

(In case you were wondering: each member of City Council gets $12,000 a year; the Mayor is paid $24,000.)

Seen at the Instant Man's, and excerpted here:

I'll buy some of this, but not all of it. Clearly some voters, and not just in Blue-On-Blueland, have had it up to here with "conservative principles," and there's no point in denying it. On the other hand, it's equally clear that the GOP brought this on themselves — while they had no monopoly on either corruption or incompetence, they set the pace for both, and their complacency was utterly mind-boggling — and if it doesn't prove to be a learning experience for them, you can expect more Republicans to be turned out of office in 2008.

When you close your checking account, you cannot continue to use the debit card associated with it.

I realize that this is a difficult concept for you, but focus.

(And next time, go to the farging 7-Eleven and buy a money order, fercrissake.)

After a few weeks of balloting, The Truth About Cars readers have selected the Ten Worst Automobiles Today, and the entire sorry lot is what Stuff magazine would characterize as "douche-y."

The truly horripilating aspect of this, of course, is that eight of these monstrosities bear domestic nameplates; the ninth is an import brand that's owned outright by a domestic manufacturer. Only the malignant Subaru B9 Tribeca has foreign origins — and even the Sube is built in the States.

You want to know why Detroit is in trouble? They approved 90 percent of these crapmobiles.

Right out of the paper, simply because I like the way this sounds:

You want to know why I voted for Jari Askins for Lieutenant Governor and Tie-Breaker? Because Todd Hiett wouldn't have thought this was so damn funny.

From 2005, Michael Bates explains Instant Runoff Voting:

This week, voters in Minneapolis chose to use IRV in municipal elections, the result of a campaign by a "grassroots coalition of political parties, social justice and environmental groups, religious institutions, and others." (List here.) Admittedly, on the red/blue continuum, Minneapolis is just this side of indigo, but I have to believe that some of the handful of conservatives in town liked the idea. (If nothing else, there's the appeal to taxpayers: it saves the cost of runoffs when one candidate fails to win a majority. Maybe Lileks will weigh in one of these days.)

It would admittedly be tricky to adopt IRV to the Oklahoma optical-scan voting system, but surely it's not impossible.

(Via Swirlspice.)

Perrigo Company, which makes store-brand equivalents of name-brand over-the-counter drugs, some of which I use, is recalling 11 million bottles of 500-mg acetaminophen caplets after discovering metal fragments in about 200 individual pills.

The company blames premature wear of its pill-stamping equipment. No injuries have so far been reported, and no severe injuries are expected.

Acetaminophen is the generic form of the drug sold as Tylenol^®. No Tylenol-branded products are affected by the recall. The affected batches are listed here.

Evidently I repeat myself on a cycle. From this week in 2004:

Having hit 84 briefly during this morning's commute, I am still not impressed by 85 mph, but I have a certain respect for 130: everything I've read says that the 2000 Infiniti I30's top speed is limited to 130 mph, and Gwendolyn is whipping around town on H-rated tires, which are good to, yes, 130 mph, and it's never occurred to me to see what happens at 131.

Which means that I'll likely never catch up to Automobile's Jean Jennings, who, in the December 2006 issue, notes that according to Mazda, the pocket-rocket Mazdaspeed 3 runs into an electronic dead end at 155 mph. The following hilarity subsequently ensued on the A95 on the way to Munich:

Hmmm. Maybe it's time I got some serious lead back into my foot.

Back in the Pleistocene era, when I put up this goofy little Web site, rather a lot of people were insistent on using only "browser-safe" colors, of which there were 216.

And while we're on the subject, there have been 216 editions of the Carnival of the Vanities, each a week later than the last, and most of which have links from me whether I have anything to offer or not.

"What cruelty is this?" I thought. "A West Coast game on a school night?" So I cranked up the radio, made it through the first quarter, noted with dismay that somehow the Hornets had managed to duplicate their infamous Third-Quarter Drought™ halfway through the second quarter, and pulled a blanket over my head.

As it turns out, it was just as well; the Bees were indeed outscored in both the second and third, and a late rally fell short as Golden State got its revenge for Tuesday night at the Ford. Final: Warriors 121, Hornets 116.

You might expect from those numbers that there was a lot of shooting, and there was: both teams shot over 50 percent from the floor, and 3-balls filled the air. The Warriors knocked down thirteen of them, four by Mickael Pietrus alone. But the big story was ex-Hornet guard Baron Davis versus current Hornet guard Chris Paul, and the two of them put on quite a show: by the time I drifted away, both of them were in double digits and running at top speed. Davis wound up with 36 points and dished up 9 assists; Paul scored 34 (a career high) with ten dimes.

All the Hornet starters scored double figures except Tyson Chandler, and he got 11 boards; Bobby Jackson added 12 off the bench. David West, still hovering around the 20-per-game mark, picked up 21. But ultimately what sealed the Bees' doom, it appears, was the dreaded turnover: 19 of them, while the Warriors gave up only ten.

Still, 4-1 is probably a game or two better than anyone expected at this point. The West Coast action continues at Portland tonight, where the Blazers aren't anywhere nearly as hapless as they were last year.

Under the Magnuson-Moss Warranty Act, he who provides a "full warranty" (anything less is a "limited warranty") must include all of the following:

• must, as a minimum, remedy the consumer product within a reasonable time and without charge;
  
• may not impose any limitation on the duration of any implied warranty on the product;
  
• may not exclude or limit consequential damages for a breach of any written or implied warranty on the product, unless the exclusion or limitation conspicuously appears on the face of the warranty; and
  
• if the product, or a component part, contains a defect or malfunction, must permit the consumer to elect either a refund or replacement without charge, after a reasonable number of repair attempts.
  

I'm sure Frank Moss and Warren Magnuson, way back in 1975, never envisioned this:

"Good afternoon, One Brimstone Place." The voice was unusually dark.

"You're answering your own phone now?"

"It's hard to get good help these days. Was there something You wanted?"

The Lord God read the paragraphs above. "What do you think? I'm tempted to send a plague of toads."

The Prince of Darkness whistled. "That's some slick guarantee there. Maybe You should just sue them or something."

"Oh, right. Where am I supposed to find a lawyer?"

"Hey, I'm just doing my job," Satan complained. "There's always Google. I hear they're trying not to be evil these days."

"Thank you, Lucifer, you've been as much help as ever."

Click.

(Via Church Marketing Sucks.)

I am normally not one to wish ill will upon an energy company — I live in the shadow of the oil patch, after all, and anything collected in Oklahoma Gross Production Tax is a sum the state won't ask me to pay — but after twenty-seven spams touting the over-the-counter stock of Cana Petroleum (symbol: CNPM), I can only hope that these people end up with dry holes, and not in a good way, either.

I generally don't go poring over the legal notices in the newspapers; they're legitimate news, but hardly ever good news, and each and every five-pound notice is packed with ten pounds of Officially Mandated Boilerplate, which is not what makes for encouraging reading. To get my attention, a legal notice has to have something I've never seen before.

Something like this one, found in the Mid-City Advocate:

Signature follows. I suppose that either this is nothing new where you live, or you can't believe that the state actually regulates such things. But I've been here more than three decades (not all of it consecutive), and to me, this is news, and not bad news either.

This will definitely make your Camaro more bitchin':

(Via Treehugger.)

The Hornets were feeling pretty good in Portland. They were up a startling 38-13 after the first quarter, and Zack Randolph hadn't even made a shot yet.

Then things started to unravel. By the beginning of the fourth quarter, the Bees were up by four, 71-67, and even that lead wouldn't last. Tyson Chandler was gone — ejected in the third quarter after a particularly exasperating T — and Randolph owned the court. With four seconds left, Peja dropped a trey to tie it at 91, and with two seconds left, David West fouled out and sent Randolph to the line. Zack missed one of the two free throws, but it didn't matter: the Blazers won it, 92-91.

Randolph wound up with 31 points and 12 rebounds, all in the last 30 minutes of the game. None of the Hornets came close, though Desmond Mason and Peja Stojakovic were hovering around the 20-point mark and Bobby Jackson, the one bright spot on the bench the last couple of games, tossed in 15. David West, rebounding in Chandler's absence, pulled down a dozen boards to go with his 17 points.

Now off to Los Angeles, for a rare afternoon game against the Clippers on Sunday. The Hornets will return to the Ford Center on Tuesday to play Charlotte.

It's a matched pair: candy bra and G-string.

I don't think I'll ever be able to eat Necco wafers again.

And if you must wear that, you might not want to wear this with it. Cognitive dissonance, doncha know.

(Both via Pop Culture Junk Mail.)

I'm starting to think Sarah is fed up:

Trust me on this. You want to open a vein? Get one of these, feed something to it, and then try to clean up the debris. It's the next-best thing to adjusting a lawn-mower blade while it's running.

(My vantage point at the bottom of 42nd and Treadmill's org chart gives me, I think, a unique perspective on these matters.)

I was standing on a mountaintop at the Edge of Nowhere, or so it seemed, staring into the face of the enemy, and I knew he was staring back.

Not that anything scary was about to happen. There was a rather large body of water between us, and even on the clearest of days I couldn't see him and he couldn't see me. Still, I knew he was there, and I assumed he knew I was there, and a few dozen other guys were making a list and checking it twice and delivering it to the commanding officer. They were doing their job, and I was doing mine.

And a few months later, that particular job came to an end; I left this post, a little older, maybe a little wiser, an unexpected medal added to my uniform, and after a few days of R&R — well, maybe some R, but not a whole lot of R, if you know what I mean — I reported back Stateside and was assigned to the Reserves for three more years.

This was before "Be all that you can be," and I've never been sure I was all that I could have been. But we had a mission, and I was part of it, and I'd like to think that I had something to do with the fact that the enemy no longer exists.

That enemy, anyway.

On this day of remembrance, there are millions more with their own stories to tell. You've already heard mine.

(Originally posted 11/11/2004.)

The St. Louis Post-Dispatch engages in serious contemplation:

Got that? "Urban and rural workers" will be hit hardest.

That leaves — um, who else is there? The guys on the International Space Station?

(Via the presumably-urban Brian J. Noggle.)

They buried Bülent Ecevit today, and after a couple of minutes, I remembered where I'd heard that name before.

Ecevit was the Prime Minister of Turkey when I arrived there for a twelve-month tour of duty in the spring of 1974. He was a staunch secularist in this mostly-Muslim nation, and was generally considered friendly toward the US.

Things began to fall apart that year. In July, Archbishop Makarios, president of Cyprus, was deposed in a coup apparently sponsored by Greece; Turkey was opposed to the new Nikos Sampson regime, and Ecevit flew to London to enlist the help of the British, who had controlled the island before a treaty of independence was signed in 1959. The British declined to get involved, but the US, perhaps fearful for the future of NATO bases in Turkey, dispatched an envoy (Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs Joseph J. Sisco) to the scene. Negotiations went nowhere, and Turkey invaded Cyprus, eventually gaining control over the northeastern third of the island. The US, upset, suspended arms shipments to Turkey; the Turks responded by curtailing US activities in Turkey that weren't specifically authorized by NATO. Our own base was covered by the NATO agreement, but some restrictions fell upon us anyway: we were barred from originating our own programming from our on-post radio station, and it seemed to take much longer to get approvals for surveillance flights. Ecevit suffered substantial political fallout from the invasion, and he was replaced as Prime Minister in November by Sadi Irmak.

Bülent Ecevit eventually returned to power, and in 1978 (I was long gone) Congress lifted the arms embargo. In 1979 he resigned again; following a coup in 1980 by the military, most political parties, including Ecevit's center-left Republican People's Party, were banned, and Ecevit was briefly imprisoned. In 1987, a referendum rescinded the ban, though Ecevit, then sixty-two, would never again have the influence he had had before.

Getting a grip on Ecevit's politics required a steady hand. While he favored greater participation in Western alliances and cultures, and firmly believed in the secular Turkey founded by Atatürk, his domestic policies tended toward the semi-socialist, occasionally perplexing Americans who were looking to open up Turkish markets. Some of us who were stationed in his country in those days tended to think rather highly of him, partly because he seemed to think rather highly of us, but perhaps also because we were overwhelmed by this utterly foreign yet somehow familiar land — the Turkish language, while obviously influenced by Arabic and Persian, is written, per Atatürk's instructions, in a Western-style alphabet — and we were inclined to cut everyone some slack.

Güle güle, sir.

Gwendolyn, as befitting her status as Sort of Luxoboat, has these high-zoot headlights with just a hint of upward slant to the sides and sheetmetal to match, which you could argue is a sign of her Japanese heritage but which I have always figured was an homage to/a ripoff of [choose one] the middle-1990s Mercedes-Benz S-class lamps. (See for yourself.)

Plastic lenses, alas, tend to accumulate crud, which manifests itself as an off-white to almost-yellow haze, which is not attractive and which obstructs the very purpose of the lights. I noticed this in the dealer's lot, but assumed it would respond to standard cleaning techniques. It does not. I let it go for awhile, decided it was not going to get better (duh), and resolved to take action: I addressed myself to a nearby auto-parts outlet which, in classic ethnic-joke fashion, was staffed by a black guy, a white guy, and a Mexican guy. I figured I couldn't go wrong with this combination, and I was right.

And this is how it came to pass that I applied Meguiar's Mirror Glaze Plastic Polish #10 with an old dish towel (meets all your daily terrycloth requirements), and six years of discoloration vanished in something less than six minutes. Try that with Visine. There was even substantial change from my $10 bill. Add this to the list of Products I Swear By, and prepare yourself for Gwendolyn's steely stare while you sit there in the fast lane at 53 mph.

Seen today in the supermarket parking lot: a red Chevy with the vanity plate NIHIL.

Simultaneous with the sighting, the song starting up from Gwendolyn's stereo: the Blues Magoos' "(We Ain't Got) Nothin' Yet."

Anyone for weird Jungian (as distinguished from Stingian) synchronicity?

"Women must not show their femininity in their social interactions."
       — Sayyed Muhammad Hussein Fadlullah, as quoted here

To further this goal, Snoopy the Goon unveils (so to speak) a true Pan-Islamic Gown. It provides the proper protections against that which is seductive, yet it is remarkably inexpensive.

Best definition I've ever heard:

I can also vouch for this one:

A whole boxful of tools here.

(Via Tam.)

Update, 4 pm: pdb traces this list to the nonpareil Peter Egan.

Seen at Popgadget, the ideal gift for the geek girl in your life: a big, floppy bag made from real floppies. A dozen of them, in fact, mounted on a black vinyl liner, which contains various pockets on the inside and a removable magnetic latch on top. For those who read hangtags, here's what this one says: CARRY YOUR STUFF IN GEEK-CHIC STYLE WITH A PURSE MADE FROM TWELVE (12) GENUINE 1.44 MB COMPUTER DISKETTES. ALLOCATE INTERIOR POCKETS TO MANAGE INTERNAL FRAGMENTATION. TOTAL AVAILABLE MEMORY: 17.28 MB. Now all I need is a geek girl. [sigh]

Hornets power forward David West, on the parsimony of backup Brandon Bass:

Bass will earn $664,209 this season (the league minimum for a second-year player), up from $398,762 last year.

Three games on the West Coast, three losses. It's not like this has never happened before, but still it stings a bit.

The Hornets played better against the Clippers, but not well enough to win. No Third-Quarter Drought™ this time — the Bees actually outscored L.A. in the third, 22-15, to pull within four — but a truly craptacular fourth quarter (only twelve points) assured the Clippers of a near-blowout victory, 92-76.

And when they weren't missing shots, the Hornets were losing the ball; they had ten turnovers in the first quarter and 23 overall. They still can't hit free throws, missing seven of 19. And of 13 3-balls, only two found their way through the net. The Clippers, meanwhile, presented a reasonably-balanced attack, and while they didn't shoot especially well, they got lots of second and even third looks.

Numbers: Chris Paul got 20 points (and five fouls); Bobby Jackson had twelve; the rest were 11 or less. (Cedric Simmons, off the bench, pulled down 8, a record for the rookie.) Tyson Chandler was effective on the boards, pulling down 13 rebounds and scoring 8. The only double-double to be seen, though, belonged to L.A.'s Elton Brand, who scored 22 points and got 10 rebounds.

The Bobcats will come to the Ford Center Tuesday, and then two more road games: Wednesday at Detroit, then Saturday at Minnesota.

The Baseball Crank is okay with "CitiField" as the name for the Mets' new digs:

Which the Chicago White Sox should have done with the "new" Comiskey, now the stirringly unresonant "U. S. Cellular Field." Not that there's anything particularly wrong with corporate names:

So long as the name stays put, anyway:

Southwestern Bell SBC AT&T Bricktown Ballpark please note.

Yes, it's yet another sifting through the referrer logs, in the hopes of finding actual search strings to which I can make snarky responses after the fact.

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