At this rate, we'll reach 100 episodes of this little sideshow by the end of next year.

Scarlett OHara New Jersey Band:  Guitar, drums and bass, but no fiddler-dee-dee.

can i sue homeowner for carbon monoxide death of my husband:  Why, did she lock him in her garage or something?

"mark cuban" intj:  Yeah, you gotta be an introvert in today's NBA.

shredded coal mine boners:  This explains much about Big Bad John.

Does Daneel Olivaw ever have a relationship with a female robot?  Not that I know of; while development of female robots took place after Susan Calvin's retirement, by then Olivaw was busy with the reinvention of himself.

does a 95 mazda 626 have clutch fluid?  That depends. Does it have a clutch?

involuntary celibacy penis size:  Usually not a factor.

maureen dowd curvy:  Well, kind of.

god hates bloggers:  Actually, God hates Blogspot, and is not all that crazy about Xanga either.

scholarships for descendants of pillsbury family?  If they don't already have enough dough of their own.

How can you tell if a man is not sexually active?  For one thing, his blog is updated daily.

Or, how to lose 3 pounds in 3 days in bed.

Wake me up around the middle of September.

I remember seeing the trailer for Zyzzyx Rd. online in early 2006; it didn't look all that appealing, but it stuck in the mind, which I suppose is all you can ask of a trailer, and the tagline — "What happens in Vegas is buried on Zyzzyx Road" — contributed to fixing that memory in place. For some reason, the spelling of the actual road, which is out somewhere in the desert on the 15 between Los Angeles and Las Vegas, was changed for the film; your guess as to why is at least as good as mine, maybe better. (Picture borrowed from Paul's Ponderings.) A lot of movies never get to a theater at all, but Zyzzyx did, and the combined star power of Tom Sizemore and the lovely Katherine Heigl brought it to a domestic gross of ... thirty dollars. (Apparently two-thirds of the take came on the opening weekend, which is not unusual for smaller pictures.) Interestingly, the film has 36 votes on the Internet Movie Database; I've got to wonder how all these people saw it, since it's apparently not on DVD.

(Story seen at Fark.com.)

Listed chronologically:

"Are we not men? We are Bevo" (4 January)
"Another one fights the rust" (7 January)
"Where the gripes of Roth are slurred" (29 January)
"Baby got loopback" (9 February)
"Freeze a jolly good fellow" (2 March)
"No Schick, Sherlock" (26 March)
"Cambridge face with the Oxford booty" (12 April)
"Everybody was feng shui fighting" (5 May)
"Oh, the manatee" (13 May)
"We got stubble! Right here in River City!" (28 May)
"Sidereal vicious" (27 June)
"Weasels we have heard on high" (5 July)
"Grout expectations" (26 July)
"Two Infinitis — and beyond!" (30 August)
"It's all ova now" (1 September)
"When I think about you I retouch myself" (21 September)
"With mallards toward none" (24 September)
"I shot the serifs" (5 October)
"Mi casserole es su casserole" (28 October)
"Too much too Zune" (14 November)
"There's no base like chrome" (21 November)
"Wet ones of ass production" (25 November)
"People for the Merkin Way" (2 December)
"Keister bonnet" (7 December)
"Ellipsis sweet as candy" (7 December)

(Total number of 2006 posts: 2,126. Some marginally-acceptable turns of phrase are recounted here.)

It is no particular secret that rather a lot of people who lined up at the stores to grab the first PS3s and Wiis (somehow "Wiis" just looks funny, and throwing an apostrophe in there would make it look worse, quite apart from being wrong) did so with the express intention of immediately selling them at a profit.

But with over 90,000 auctions posted, how do you draw attention to your own? Exactly: throw in a little sex.

(Safety for work questionable; improvement in sales figures even more so.)

On today's to-do list, only just recently completed:

• Laundry (three loads).
  
• Weed out 2006 magazine stacks. (Basically, this means: box up the six titles I keep, dispose of the rest. "The rest" filled 3½ lawn/leaf bags.)
  
• Listen to the Beatles' Love all the way through. (Reaction is somewhere between "Cool" and "Meh".)
  
• Start Zocor regime.
  
• Clean bathroom.
  
• Sort unpaid bills by due date. (Most of them are due on the 8th and will be paid on the 3rd.)
  
• Review annual memberships, add new one.
  
• Hang calendars. (I have three for this year, including one from these guys and one from these girls.)
  
• Check Gwendolyn's fluids. (Oil change due in late January.)
  
• Disassemble bedroom fan, blow out accumulated dust, reassemble.
  
• Toss about 40 browser bookmarks that are no longer valid.
  

For someone as indolent as I, this is a lot of work for a day off.

I've had generally kind words for Movable Type's version 3.xx spam tools; while the nasty stuff still comes in, none of it actually gets put on the site, which is fine with me.

For the last week or so, though, there has been literally no incoming spam, not even on TrackBacks, where most of them materialize. Since it's too much to hope that the scumbuckets have mended their ways, I went looking for a more plausible explanation, and here's what I found:

I suppose this means I should brace myself, starting about ten minutes from now, for an all-out assault on my scripts.

Update, 7:30 am: It took a whole hour for the first spam to show up.

A couple of decades ago, 7-Eleven stores took it upon themselves, with a nudge from nudnik Donald Wildmon, to stop selling Playboy and its ilk. Playboy responded with a "Women of 7-Eleven" feature; I responded by taking my business elsewhere. And I am legendary for the sheer persistence of my grudges, so I wouldn't have noticed what Dave Munger noticed:

I don't know if this extends to Oklahoma 7-Eleven stores, which are not actually owned by Southland Corporation or its Japanese parent company, but around here, just about everyone has been insistent that you pay first ever since the first glimpses of $3 gas.

Last week, with the able assistance of Tamara K., I made some snide remarks about how we're approaching mandatory bubbles for boys (and, for that matter, for girls), lest they get an owie somewhere.

Andrea Harris points out that the grownups apparently yearn for bubbles of their own:

As a card-carrying member of the Vainest Generation, I have to concur. Fortunately, I didn't get much coddling early on, so it's not like me to expect any today, although my capacity for whining is at least average for my demographic cohort.

With this in mind, I'd like to borrow a hat, and then tip it to the Ethiopian army, which, in the traditional American spirit and with the assistance of some traditional Americans, fought a passel of Islamic nutjobs on a truly level playing field: if you got onto the field, you got leveled. Truly.

Autonet is rolling out a wireless-Internet package that runs off Verizon's EV-DO network. And "rolling" is the operative word, since it's intended for use in your car.

I bounced this idea off Trini, and she was quick to point out an application: "Set up a music server at home, and take your tunes wherever you go."

It's a little pricey — $399 for the hardware, fifty bucks a month — but someone who travels more than I do might find this an absolute boon.

Well, if Crossroads Mall can't make a go of it with ownership from California, let's give the Arkansawyers a chance:

Sam Mathias operates Mathias Properties in Springdale, Arkansas; John Flake heads up Flake & Kelley Real Estate Management in Little Rock; Doyle Rogers runs the Doyle Rogers Company, with offices in Little Rock and Batesville. None of these fellows are what you'd call small-timers, so I'm pretty sure they're not in over their heads.

The Macerich Company owned all three of these malls. Citadel in Colorado Springs is just under 1.1 million square feet and is anchored by Dillard's, JCPenney and Macy's. (There was a Mervyn's, which has closed.) Northwest Arkansas Mall in Fayetteville covers 820,000 square feet; its anchors are Dillard's, JCPenney and Sears. (Dillard's has two anchor spots here, suggesting that something else left.)

Last spring I suggested that Crossroads was doomed; let's hope that judgment was a trifle premature.

Update, 9 am Wednesday: Apparently, says someone who's familiar with the area, the second Dillard's at Northwest Arkansas Mall was built on; it didn't replace something else.

The Warriors came to Oklahoma City having beaten the Hornets two games out of three, and boasting one new player: guard Kelenna Azubuike, the leading scorer in the D-League so far this season, who came up from Fort Worth today to help fill out Golden State's injury-ridden roster.

The Bees ran up a 12-point lead in the first quarter; Golden State made up the difference rather quickly and then some. It was 49-45 Warriors at the half. The ever-unpopular Third-Quarter Drought™ left Golden State up 13 after three; the Hornets fought back in the fourth, at one point pulling to within three, but Golden State prevailed, 97-89.

Matt Barnes inflicted the most damage, scoring 29 (including 5 of 9 from beyond the arc) and hauling down 10 rebounds. One-time Hornet Baron Davis also dropped in 29. The new kid, Azubuike, got to play 16 minutes, garnering four points and three rebounds.

Both Rasual Butler and Jannero Pargo did some serious shooting, Butler scoring 30 and Pargo 24. Tyson Chandler still isn't scoring a lot, but he pulled down 15 boards. The big difference? The Hornets gave up 16 turnovers, versus only 6 for the Warriors.

The Pistons will be here Thursday, as will the TNT broadcast crew. The Hornets beat Detroit earlier in the season; I promise to be delighted should it happen again.

There are few things in life as much fun as the curt dismissal of an entire genre:

It is indeed not that daring, but that's as far as I'll go with it. I have to admire, though, the sheer pluck of someone who can read the complete oeuvre of three fairly prolific writers while presumably being bored throughout the entire exercise. (I couldn't take that much of Herbert myself.)

Of course, there's always the chance that our critic is more interested in demonstrating how superior he is to those SF partisans, inasmuch as he's read The Vicar of Wakefield, but that couldn't be it, could it?

And God forbid women should read this stuff:

Is that the problem? It's "male-oriented"? Horrors! Bring on the romances!

(Via Kathy Shaidle, who presumably had her reasons.)

Yesterday, Ray Vaughn was sworn in for the first time as District 3 Commissioner in Oklahoma County; shortly thereafter, Brent Rinehart of District 2 nominated Vaughn to serve as chair.

Vaughn declined:

Which, you can be sure, annoyed Rinehart; the "same leadership we've had," District 1's Jim Roth, has been a thorn in Rinehart's side for some time, and Vaughn has already said he will work with Roth to restore the Budget Board, which was abolished by Vaughn's predecessor, Stan Inman, and Rinehart back in 2005 in a fit of pique.

Go get 'em, Ray.

If you wish to apply to the Drug Enforcement Administration for "controlled-substance registration," and you operate a hospital, a retail pharmacy or an individual medical practice, you must fill out DEA Form 224 and submit it to DEA with the application fee (currently $551).

I have no idea what substances Kehaar has been hitting, but apparently they didn't keep him from running Carnival of the Vanities #224, the most recent incarnation of the oldest weekly blog compilation.

After yet another CNN blunder with a text overlay (though it pales by comparison to this one), Wonkette has a suggestion for Senator Obama:

Besides, you know Hillary and Rudy will, and Mitt probably won't.

There are still places that will sell you an 800 or other toll-free number, and I have to believe that the proprietors are desperate to move these things, since the entire long-distance market is about to become obsolete, thanks to cell phones and VoIP. Besides, any time I see such a number on Caller ID, I know it's a waste of time even to pick up the phone.

So when the new industrial-strength blocking device comes in, rather than force everyone to get an ID to call me, I'm simply going to block every single toll-free number in North America, be it 800, 888, 877 or 866. The machine can handle 175 database entries; this procedure will use up only four, leaving me plenty for future use.

Jeff Jarvis thinks he got ripped off by Burger King:

Which, if nothing else, lends credence to the following:

• You should never assume that prices will be consistent at franchised fast-food joints;
  
• There is no incident so trivial that someone won't blog about it;
  
• There is no blog post so trivial that someone won't link to it.
  

Oh, and Jeff? Wendy's nuggets are better.

(Seen by Rachel.)

You've seen the Likert scale before: you're given a list of statements, and you're supposed to:

• Strongly disagree.
  
• Disagree.
  
• Neither agree nor disagree.
  
• Agree.
  
• Strongly agree.
  

The scale itself isn't biased, but how it's displayed can be:

The most expedient solution, it would seem, would be to prepare all surveys of this type with half the forms with "Strongly agree" on the left and half with "Strongly disagree" on the left. Still undetermined: whether this bias persists to the same extent with extended Likert scales, with seven or nine choices. Also still undetermined: whether my beginning the description of the scale with "Strongly disagree" instead of "Strongly agree" reflects my bias.

(Via Zack Wendling.)

James Lileks, Technical Support Wizard:

The man is obviously much kinder than I.

It's been a while since there's been a Worst Songs Ever thread, and Scott Kirwin is running one over at Dean's World with the expected results. Scott's own bêtes noires:

What all these have in common, most obviously, is an origin in the 1970s, which some people contend represented the absolute nadir in popular music. I'm not sure I believe that, although of the twenty songs I dislike the most, fifteen were Seventies releases.

Actually, I like "You're So Vain," though I'd like it better if it didn't turn up five times a week on the radio. Back when the charts had something to do with airplay, about 500-600 records would chart every year. A station with a Sixties-Seventies format, such as Oklahoma City's KOMA, would therefore have upwards of 10,000 songs to choose from — but they play maybe a twentieth of that. Even Jack FM claims a playlist of only 1000 or so.

Feel free to contribute your own examples of songs which make you want to change the station.

Diane's son brings home a note from class, and it's a tad disquieting:

Not so awful, although that last sentence doesn't scan. (TAKS is the Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills.) But then this appears:

As I write this, the Pistons are beating the Hornets; it's 58-32 at the half. But you know, the Hornets looked really good at this morning's shootaround, and that's what counts, right?

You have to figure that when Rip Hamilton gets 17 points in the first quarter, the Pistons are going to dominate — especially since the Hornets managed only 19 in aggregate. And then it got worse: the Bees, unable to buy a bucket, scored a meager 13 points in the second quarter, shooting an appalling 31.8 percent in the first half.

But in the third, weirdly, it was Detroit who suffered the Third-Quarter Drought™, picking up only 14, and their 26-point lead dwindled to 18; it dropped to 14 early in the fourth before the Pistons started hitting on, you should pardon the expression, all cylinders, and dispatched the reeling Hornets, 92-68.

Bobby Jackson, recovering from a cracked rib and sporting a flak jacket worthy of the L.A.P.D., reported for duty, played five and a half minutes, scored 7, and then was spirited back to the locker room: apparently he hasn't recovered quite enough just yet. And Rasual Butler, after scoring three in half an hour, retired with "flu-like symptoms." Jannero Pargo scored 16 to lead the Bees, but he had to put up 24 shots to get it; the team hit only 29 of 88 from the floor, 30 percent. Tyson Chandler, meanwhile, pulled down 16 rebounds.

Oh, and Rip Hamilton? Despite exiting early with five fouls, he got 27 points. Tayshaun Prince had the night's only double-double: 15 points, 10 boards.

The Pacers are supposed to be here Saturday. Maybe they can phone it in and save the airfare.

"Vorführeffekt," in literal German, is "presentation effect," but it has been extended to cover a very specific situation: when the technician you've called in (probably at great expense) to solve your problem isn't able to replicate the issue with your machine.

The closest English equivalent I've seen is "serviception," which presumes a degree of hardware sentience: the machine can actually sense the presence of the technician, and will behave properly until such time as the technician departs or the machine is moved out of range.

(Via Laura Lemay.)

Samsung is showing a refrigerator equipped with RFID. What for, you ask?

God only knows what this will cost:

Can it tell a good tomato from a bad one? And, perhaps just as important, will it flirt with the checkout girls?

Eric Siegmund, on running video on his iPod:

Incidentally, "a day without rutabagas" produces no Google results. Yet.

How do I know this day isn't going well? A coworker was stuck for a word, and floated a definition past me, and said word turned out to be "incubus."

I'm not sure which is worse: that she wanted to know about it, or that it was automatically assumed that I would know about it.

Tamara K., cracking wise today:

Which is by way of saying that, after some weeks lurking at Woot, I actually snagged some wootage this week: an actual two-gig drive, with a real platter and everything, that plugs into a USB port. (Here's the original sales pitch.) I suppose a flash drive might be a tad more reliable, and maybe a little faster, but this thing flat flies, and at eighteen bucks plus shipping, including a USB extension cable, it was hard to resist, especially since the alternative is to burn two or three CD-Rs every time I feel like backing up the files I'd most hate to lose. (I do have a flash drive here at the Shotgun Shack, but it's smaller. Capacity, I mean.)

These sold out in ten hours or so; I suspect a few of them will be sprinkled through future Bags O' Crap.

The DreamHost surfer dudes, who have hosted this place for five years now, went through considerable sorrow and pain last year, rather a lot of which was passed down to their unsuspecting customers. (One database machine I remember was thoroughly hosed, and not in a good way either.)

And their rep took a substantial hit:

What's an egg-sucking hosting company to do? Well, if everyone thinks they're overselling, then they'll sell (slightly) less:

Of course, once the new customers are snagged, they can benefit from the ridiculous disk and bandwidth increases that we old-timers enjoy. (My current disk limit is 333 GB; I'm allowed 3.95 TB — this is not a typo — of pipe per month.) And incidentally, my Web-server machine is being moved Monday night to the New and Improved Datacenter.

J. M. Branum has a new project: the Oklahoma Wiki, and it's intended to go beyond the information available at, say, Wikipedia, where, he says, "some of the more interesting topics are often not covered or are even censored by the editors."

It will be interesting to see how this develops. Right now it's kind of raw and unpolished, but that's to be expected early on.

Every Saturday, the Oklahoman runs a list of major land sales in Oklahoma County, based on the County Clerk's report, and more often than not, there's something interesting lurking in there. For instance:

JM Investors LLC from Christine Gaylord Everest, Louise Gaylord Bennett and David O. Hogan, 1506 Dorchester Drive, $1.1 million.

This is, if I remember correctly, the home of the late Edward L. Gaylord, publisher of the Oklahoman. Mrs Everest succeeded her father as chair and CEO of OPUBCO; Mrs Bennett is the corporate secretary. And speaking of Mrs Bennett:

Clayton I. and Louise G. Bennett from Eloise M. McEldowney, 6600 NW Grand Blvd., $1.8 million.

Clay Bennett heads up Dorchester Capital here in the city, and Professional Basketball Club LLC, which owns the Seattle SuperSonics of the NBA and the Seattle Storm of the WNBA. I hesitate to read too much into this, but I suspect that Mr Bennett doesn't aspire to live around the corner from Bill Gates.

Regular readers will recall (and the rest of you can read this) that in the summer of '05 I put out the long dollar for Teac's GF-350 compact stereo system, which contained a CD recorder and a three-speed turntable. It produced decent, if not inspiring, CD versions of beloved (and merely tolerated) LPs, which at the time I attributed to the use of a ceramic phono cartridge, which can't compensate especially well for the RIAA equalization baked into the grooves: recordings were bass-shy and a bit peaky at the top end.

Fixing the EQ after the fact is not especially difficult, but I kept wondering: maybe if I bypassed Teac's own record player and used my own, I'd get better results. Today I tried exactly that, connecting my trusty Onkyo direct-drive turntable with Pickering XV-15/750E cartridge to the Teac's AUX jacks by way of a preamp from these guys. After recording six LP tracks, none newer than the early 1980s, I am persuaded that I was correct, although it's hard to tell the difference through the GF-350's own speakers, which have their own limitations.

There is one downside: when using the AUX input, the automatic track-increment gizmo does not work. This is no particular problem, since my standard practice is to rip the CDs produced on the machine on the desktop PC and twiddle the resulting .wav file as needed; I can break it up myself, or mark the track breaks when I burn a fresh CD with Nero.

Still, it's possible to eliminate one additional step: connect the output of the phono preamp to the line input of the PC's sound card. And if I could find the line input of this box's integrated audio, I would. (Actually, I know where it is, but I'm lacking in AC outlets on that side of the room, and I am loath to go buy a 20-socket power strip.)

"Why don't you pour boiling water into my eyes while you're at it?" exclaimed Sean Kelley midway through the second quarter. It was that kind of night: the game started late because the shot clocks weren't working; Jannero Pargo was sent back to the bench in favor of Devin Brown; and three Indiana starters scored 20 points or more. The Hornets' game was actually much improved from recent days, and they were in it until almost the end, but the result was more of the same: Pacers 100, Hornets 93.

Desmond Mason had a hot hand, dropping in 28 points. Five other Hornets scored in double figures, but the low double figures: Pargo had 14; Brown and Marc Jackson had 11; Rasual Butler and Tyson Chandler had 10. (Chandler picks up a double-double: he had 10 rebounds.)

The Indiana sharpshooters, though, were way sharp. Al Harrington and Stephen Jackson picked up 27 each; Jermaine O'Neal scored 22.

Byron Scott is frustrated, to be sure, but sooner or later some of the wounded will heal, won't they?

The Clippers will be here Monday.

NewsOK.com has a poll up: "If the NBA returns to the Ford Center in 2008-09, which franchise would you prefer?"

Now we already know they won't be here in 2007-08, but given the existing situations in both Seattle and New Orleans, there isn't a great deal of reason to believe that either the Sonics or the Hornets will relocate here permanently, in 2008 or even 2009.

For what it's worth, at the time I took it, there were only seven votes in, and the Hornets were leading 5-2.

I mentioned elsewhere that I was buying one of these, and now that it's been here for 36 hours, I feel I can give it a reasonable assessment.

The actual hookup is ridiculously simple: you run the usual phone cord from the wall jack into the LINE IN jack, connect the phone to the PHONE jack, and connect the answering machine to the ANS MACH jack. It does require an available AC outlet.

The documentation, alas, is not very good. The manufacturer (I bought this from a reseller) would like you to envision this as a complete "household telephone management system," and their manual focuses on all the positive benefits of the system with various available-at-extra-cost extensions, while I suspect most buyers just want to know the quick-and-dirty negative stuff: "How do I keep this SOB from ringing my phone?"

I did note with some amusement that one number is already keyed into the memory: the manufacturer's tech-support line.

How it works, with my particular options enabled, on any given incoming call:

• The number is compared to what's in the database. The search order: number exact match, number wildcard match, name exact match, name wildcard match.

• If there's a match, the database record is pulled up and the specified action is taken. (In this case, the action is: route directly to answering machine, do not ring.)

• If there's no match, the call rings through.
  

This is at the lowest level of screening, which I anticipate will be all I need. At the highest level of screening, only numbers that are in the database and tagged for automatic approval will be allowed to ring through. People who get threatening calls might consider the highest level. (There's one intermediate level.)

There are remotes which can be added to this contraption; it's possible to set an incoming call from, say, daughter's scruffy boyfriend, to ring only at daughter's extension. (Of course, he calls on her cell phone anyway, but such is life.)

In practice, operation is pretty seamless. If you dial an outgoing number, the machine will display it, in case you want to go ahead and enter it into the database without waiting for a call from it. (Which, incidentally, is how I set up my initial ban list.) Of the three incoming calls so far this weekend, one was a test from my cell phone, which was let through; two were from telemarketers via a wildcard match, who were sent immediately to the answering machine with no ring. The ban list contains wildcards for all four common toll-free NPAs (800, 888, 877, 866) and two numbers which annoy me on a regular basis. Hardware geeks will note that there are eight actual DIP switches on the back, for setting various arcane options. I didn't need any of them.

Verdict: Pricey, perhaps, but it sure is quiet around here.

Byron (his friends call him Barney) Calame is the "public editor" of The New York Times, the second such since the position was established in 2003, and he may be the last:

Daniel Okrent, first Times public editor, said he "would be disappointed to see [the position] eliminated."

This detail in the Observer piece caught Brendan Nyhan's eye:

To which Nyhan responds:

Short answer: yes.

Actually, I think Maureen Dowd is the secret child of Disney's Kim Possible and Ron Stoppable, and whatever Type A personality traits she may have inherited from Kim are offset by Ron's intractable B-ness. Besides, Ron is sweet and goofy, and God forbid Maureen should ever show such a side.

Nielsen SoundScan has put out its annual results, and while most blog attention has been focused on the rise of downloads at the expense of actual CD sales, I'm looking at genre totals (figures presumably in thousands), which came out like this:

Oh, was it, now?

The big news here, if you ask me, is that classical was up a fifth, and rap was down a fifth. I raise a fifth (one drink at a time, you may be sure) in celebration of these numbers.

And here's something else heartening (figures in millions this time):

Current becomes "catalog" at 18 months: catalog becomes "deep" after 18 more (36 total). These numbers suggest a growing belief among the buying public that the newer it is, the more likely it sucks. Radio, of course, demonstrates this every day.

And Johnny Cash outsold everyone but Rascal Flatts this year, which surely proves something.

Triticale titles a piece about beards "Gras bilong fes", a Tok Pidgin term for "beard," which I, after looking at it for a moment and recalling what little I knew about Pidgin syntactic rules, determined was "grass belong [on] face," a pretty good description when you think about it.

Curious, I poked about in the weird world of Google, and found this Pidgin translation of the Biblical prohibition of adultery:

It helps to say it out loud. Here's a translation site, using the presumably-preferred "Pisin" spelling for "Pidgin." (Hey, if Peking Beijing can do it, why not Papua New Guinea?)

While I was working this up, the wheat-rye guy himself sent me this:

On a hunch, I tried the Latin version of Google to look up "cell phone," which did not yield up "telephonicium cellulare" as expected.

Chronically behind the Zeitgeist as I am, I'm only just now catching up to this "blog crush" business, which apparently peaked on the 15th of December, a day on which you (or I, anyway) was supposed to own up to feelings of this sort, as Neil Kramer did, and right on time, too.

Upon reflection, I think that over the years I've managed one such crush of A-level intensity, and rather a lot that fall into the high-B category. (I was once asked if a certain someone on my blogroll was there because of a particular photo that appears on her template; I pointed out that she had been added to the roll before that template went into use, but I suspect I was not believed.)

Still, "crush" is a rather open-ended term, so using as expansive a definition as I dare, let me say that there are quite a few folks whose writing style leaves me sometimes literally gaping in slack-jawed awe, and that there are some exquisitely beautiful site designs out there. It is my fervent hope for the new year (well, one of them, anyway) that these two sets continue to avoid intersecting.

Shall I do these seven times? From the looks of things, I could do them seventy times seven, in which case everything up to now is tithe.

nudism in greenland:  Brrr.

nigeria builder women love scam dating "dave"  Dave's not here. He's busy wiring good-faith money to Lagos.

desmond mason married to a white woman:  Yeah, so?

bandwidth baby jesus  We're talking more than mere terabytes here.

"fat vegetarians":  A lot of them fought for the Romans, if I remember correctly.

"is it a date or hanging out":  I suggest that if it's hanging out, you probably won't get a date.

why do people zoned out?  Um, they bored silly?

Nancy Pelosi leg photos:  You'll remember that no one asked to see anything of Dennis Hastert's.

hummer windshield scraper:  Not to be confused with sucking the chrome off a trailer hitch.

illegal olsen twins in thongs:  Sorry, Chucko, the Olsen twins are legal now.

insipid GoDaddy parked page:  You should see some of the ones they actually host.

heather locklear bowlegs:  I think as close as she ever got was Tulsa.

insufficient bendy erect penis:  Seems to me, if it's bendy, it's hardly erect.

we all realize that you are reluctant to spit the 3 day old Doritos out of your mouth and think of a decent comeback but you are starting to look a little girly. Please go purge and gargle, then come back with some better lines to defend yourself:  [gulp!]

terry jacks dies:  He had joy, he had fun, he had seasons in the sun, but so far as I know, he had not stopped breathing.

What's a charter school like? We have ten charter schools in the Oklahoma City district. Tulsa has three, including the Deborah Brown Community School:

Tulsa Public Schools pays Deborah Brown's school about $850,000 a year. All three Tulsa charters outperform the district as a whole, so obviously they've got to go:

What's in that resolution? Michael Bates parses it:

And they're hoping that the law is found unconstitutional on technical grounds, since it covers only thirteen school districts. (Similar arguments were made against the law which permits municipal workers to organize, which applied only to cities 35,000 population and above; the state Supreme Court rejected them.)

As a resident of one of those thirteen districts, I'm firmly in favor of keeping, even expanding, the charters, and it's not hard to see why: if they improve the quality of education available in the district, it will make living here in the central city more appealing. Michael Bates explains:

And the regular schools, contrary to popular belief, benefit also:

The Oklahoma City charter experience has not been so unequivocally positive as Tulsa's — not all OKC charters are outperforming the district — but there's none of Tulsa's disdain, either.

The Tulsa school board will vote on this resolution tonight. Mark Twain is standing by with a remark about idiots, just in case.

Update: Steven Roemerman (the elder) attended the board meeting; the resolution passed 4-3.

Stuff (2/07) popped this question to some guys: "What song did you lose your virginity to?" Most of the answers didn't seem that interesting, but these two did. First, Teller:

Penn Jillette, unsurprisingly, has a vastly different tale to tell:

"It don't matter to me," reply my remaining readers.

The New York Times is on its way out of the television business, having dealt its Broadcast Media Group to Oak Hill Capital Partners, a diversified investment firm with lots of holdings, none of them in broadcast. The Times retains its two New York radio stations, WQXR (classical) and WQEW (Radio Disney under a local marketing agreement).

So what happens to KFOR and KAUT, the two Oklahoma City stations that were sold? Nothing, at least at first. Oak Hill has given no indication that it plans to sell off any of the stations they're buying.

Oak Hill was founded by Fort Worth billionaire Robert Bass; among the partners are Phil Knight of Nike and Microsoft's Bill Gates.

Americans charged $51 billion worth of fast food last year, about 32 percent of all burgers, shakes, fries, tacos, whatever. I'd like to think most of this was done on debit cards, but somewhere out there is some shlub who's paying 19.9 percent interest on a McRib.

Based on a theme by Mike Godwin, and in my experience at least as valid:

By Diana Peterfreund, and first seen here. (I think "Peterfreund's Law" is probably a better name for it, but it's not for me to say.)

Hornets 26, Clippers 15 after the first? This was a game of streaks: the Angelenos made up nine points of that deficit in the second quarter, the rest of it early in the third, and then the Bees started scoring again, running the lead back up to 10 — and then the Clippers went on a run of their own, and the third quarter ended with the Hornets up a mere 73-72.

Then that wily old veteran Sam Cassell took command from off the L.A. bench, and the Clippers would utterly dominate the fourth quarter, winning it 100-90. Cassell, who is rumored to have known Dr James Naismith personally, scored 31 of those points himself.

Apart from those last 12 minutes, the Bees played some pretty decent ball, with all five starters in double figures, Desmond Mason getting his second consecutive 28-point game, and Tyson Chandler scoring 13 and pulling 13 boards. But the less said about that fourth quarter, the better.

Gilbert Arenas and the Wizards will be here Friday, but between now and then, there's a trip to Atlanta to take on the Hawks, who, last time out, beat the Clippers by 12. I have a really bad feeling about this.

Tech support didn't take care of your problem? Send them this, says McGehee:

I may actually have to use this.

Biting the hand that feeds you, I've always believed, is one of the four basic food groups. Right Wing News proprietor John Hawkins enjoys a snack with The 20 Most Annoying People on the Right.

Oh, George W. Bush is on the list:

Also mentioned: Joseph Farah of WorldNetDaily; ex-House Speaker Dennis Hastert; and former Representative Katherine Harris, who ran "the worst campaign in America," which is going some considering the prodigious badness of George Allen's.

Because Erica asked, here's a list of my podcast subscriptions:

• The Glenn & Helen Show
  
• Musical Exile with hideelee
  
• Ready Steady A Go Go
  
• The Daily Bitch
  
• Rocketboom
  
• The Onion Radio News
  
• The Diner
  
• The Word Nerds
  
• The Ugly Girls' Club
  

There may be others to come, depending on whether I can squeeze a few more minutes out of the day.

(Speaking of Erica, she's gotten herself a Coastbusters T-shirt.)

Steve Lackmeyer at the Oklahoman has been catching flak because of the MTV/VH1 writeup of Flaming Lips Alley, which contained this incendiary passage:

Mr Lackmeyer demurs:

Meanwhile, a fan using the nym "BlueNote83" seeks to set the record straight:

He follows with a gallery of ten photos (scroll down to his next post) and this pertinent observation:

And that goes double for those of you who live here.

Wouldn't it be cool if Bill Quick actually got a cut of the proceeds from this T-shirt?

I say "cool" because "absolutely frickin' unheard-of," while more precise, grates on the ear.

And we'll put the load right on you.

Actually, I don't expect anyone to answer any of these, but if Rachel can post this, so can I.

1. Give me a nickname and explain why you picked it.

2. Am I lovable?

3. How long have you known me?

4. When and how did you first find my blog?

5. What was your first impression?

6. Do you still think that way about my blog now?

7. If I were an ice cream flavor, which would I be and why?

8. What makes me happy?

9. What makes me sad?

10. What song (if any) reminds you of me?

11. If you could give me anything what would it be?

12. Do you consider me a friend?

13. How often do you visit my blog?

14. Ever wanted to tell me something but couldn’t?

15. Would you make a move on me?

16. Describe me in one word.

17. Do you feel that you could talk to me about anything and I would listen?

18. What do you like most about me/my blog?

19. What do you dislike most about me/my blog?
    

I swear, Carmen and the Devil must have worked this one up, side by side.

(One word changed in the original text, for reasons which I assume are obvious.)

The Feds, specifically the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, would like to crank up auto safety standards, which in and of itself is not a bad idea, though this worries me:

And what good can a test possibly be if there aren't enough failures? Are we worried about grade inflation, fercrissake? It's not like the Feds grade on the curve.

I admit up front that in my evaluate-and-purchase routine, which I perform as little as I possibly can, I don't pay the slightest attention to crash data, inasmuch as it is not my intention to use the item purchased to crash. (The last car in which I did crash — curse you, Bambi — scored four stars on the driver's side, five on the passenger's, frontally speaking, though the only reason I can tell you that is because I looked it up just now.)

This is not to say that the NHTSA is utterly devoid of good ideas: they've proposed making electronic stability control mandatory, a move which has the potential to reduce substantially the actual number of crashes. (Besides, since ESC runs off the same hardware as antilock brakes, ABS will become mandatory as well, and after living with it for half a year, I'm no longer persuaded that ABS is a crock.) This will almost certainly save more lives than trying to find new places to stuff airbags. (And besides, you already know what I think about airbags.)

There are 225 squares on a Scrabble^® board.

And so far there are 225 installments of the Carnival of the Vanities; the most recent of them can be found at Silflay Hraka, and therein you'll find many articles, some at angles to one another, but always fitting into the grid.

I am a firm (not to the extent of washboard abs, but work with me here) believer in the concept of Trust Your Gut: there's no reason to assume that your second or third impression is necessarily going to be any better than your first. Not everyone agrees with this premise — the last time I brought it up, the voice of John Cusack (in this) was echoed back to me:

But then there's this:

Now this says, very distinctly, "certain situations": it doesn't say "always." But given my particular propensities — given enough time, I can talk myself out of anything that has the slightest possibility of being beneficial — I think my position, if not exactly vindicated, is certainly (somewhat) justified.

(Via Ravings of a Feral Genius.)

Hornets rookie forward Marcus Vinicius has been sent to the D-League's Tulsa 66ers for six games; he's expected to return on the 22nd of January. GM Jeff Bower says this was timed to give the Brazilian some extra playing experience; unspoken, but fairly obvious, is the hope that starting power forward David West will be back in the lineup soon. West, who had arthroscopic surgery on his elbow last month, is now participating in team drills, which must be considered a good sign.

The one question I had when the Atlanta game started was "Is Speedy Claxton gonna kill us?" Claxton was the Hornets' sixth man last year, and let's face it, he was never going to get a starting job with Chris Paul around, so I don't blame him for jumping to the Hawks. And with both CP3 and Bobby Jackson, this year's sixth man, out of action, Claxton might have chuckled a bit before the game.

Unfortunately for Speedy, he checked out at the half with a sprain, four points and three assists. Worse for the Hawks, Zaza Pachulia also exited halfway through. So with the walking wounded more or less balanced, it became apparent that both these teams were capable of stinking up the joint.

At which point the Hornets decided not to stink. (Sometimes it is that simple.) After a 23-23 first quarter, the Bees started hitting shots, and the Hawks stopped hitting them; the Bees led by 5 at the half, by 14 after three, eventually running the lead into the middle twenties; the final was 96-77.

Byron Scott's current scheme, of starting Devin Brown at the point and having Jannero Pargo spell him, seems to be working better than the other way around; Brown got a respectable 16 points, but Pargo exploded for 24 points, hitting 10 of 16 including four of five treys. Rasual Butler, at small forward, responded with 21. And Tyson Chandler is actually scoring these days: he got 14 tonight, his season high, and 9 boards. The Bees hit 34 of 65 for 52 percent, with 9 of 16 from beyond the arc.

The Hawks got plenty of second chances — they had 13 offensive rebounds, versus a mere three for the Hornets — but the ball wouldn't drop. Atlanta hit 30 of 90, 33 percent. Joe Johnson, their usual leading scorer, was held to 13; Josh Childress got 19 off the bench.

It's in and out for the next five games: Friday at the Ford against the Wizards; to Milwaukee on Saturday; back to the Big Breezy on Tuesday to host the Magic; a Friday-night trip to San Antonio, and the Lakers arrive on the 20th.

For a change, all my 401(k) investment options paid off decently in 2006; I wound up with an overall return of 8.84 percent. (For those appalled at how much money Goldman Sachs employees made last year, let it be said that the segment that they sub-advised — I love that word — earned 14.60 percent, which wasn't even the highest return I got.)

For the curious, I am hedged up to here: I'm in a traditional money-market account, a flat-rate account that rolls over every year, a stock-index fund, a large-cap blend fund, and a bond/mortgage fund. I even, yes, Lord help me, it is true, have a few shares of the people who administer all this stuff.

(Remember the generally lousy market of 2001? For the year I was down 0.79 percent. Now that's hedged.)

I have yet to compare notes with our CFO, but I've beaten him five years out of the last six, so I am hopeful. I'm not so confident, though, that I'm willing to offer investment advice, even to Mike.

Update, 9 am: The CFO beat me this year. He said he'd gone after some more aggressive investments this time around. Most everyone, he reports, did fairly well, and no one came out negative.

Morris Garages was the distributor in Oxford for Morris motorcars; despite the similarity in names, the two companies were not related. Yet.

In the 1920s, Morris Garages began tricking out sedate Morris Cowley sedans, which they vended under the name "MG Special." The name stuck, even after Morris Garages owner William Morris, later Lord Nuffield, sold out to the Morris auto company in the Thirties, and we had MGs for decades to come.

The Chinese, now proprietors of the octagon, have inexplicably decided to inform their domestic-market buyers that "MG" in fact means "Modern Gentleman", to the general dismay of people who know better. Personally, I think that if we're going to engage in this sort of nomenclatural revisionism, we should remember the last days of British Leyland's MGB, whose once-perky engine was detuned and detuned again in an effort to meet American emissions specifications, until its original 95 ponies were cut back to 63. By any reasonable standards, those machines were Mostly Gasping.

Night before last, I sent an email to a friend of mine who has an Earthlink account; it bounced with the following curt notice:

As it happens, Earthlink is blocking mail from DreamHost mail servers, and DH hasn't been able to get the block removed. This isn't exactly earth-shaking news — and I can send mail, if I have to, from Hotmail, from my cable provider, even through Earthlink itself (I have a dialup account there for backup) — but I still feel just slightly insulted.

Then again, if you fuse all those complaints together, you get Dynamic Zombie Spam, which I think is a helluva good band name.

Last year, Six Flags came this close to selling its Oklahoma City parks to local folks, but nothing came of it, and I can't say that I'm surprised to see that the two facilities were unloaded as part of a package deal today.

The buyer, a Florida real-estate trust called PARC, is getting seven parks for $312 million; PARC will then sell them to CNL Income Properties, which will then lease them back to PARC.

What effect this will have on White Water Bay or Frontier City remains to be seen, though I keep thinking "tax loss."

Suck UK, once derided as the most overrated design team ever, is selling scads of these, in this table-vase form and a wall-mounted version, each around $65 at the current exchange rate. It's deucedly simple, too: you fill the barrel with water, then insert the stems. Even your average garden-variety hoplophobe can handle it. (Maybe.) If this isn't dangerous enough for you, they also sell coat hooks in the shape of British darts. Given my inexplicable fondness for things that aren't especially safe, I'm surprised I don't already have a brace of these; on the other hand, there's nothing inherently unsafe about these things, unless you expect to subdue an intruder with one — in which case, roses are recommended, what with the sharp, pointy bits along the stems and such. (Seen at Popgadget with a better title.)

A tag for this came in from just muttering, and while I could convincingly (I think) argue that I've already answered this one, many moons ago, I figure, how hard can it be to come up with five more Strange But True Tales?

• Westbound 19th Street in Austin, Texas, since renamed for Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., used to, and may still — I haven't been down there in about five years — suddenly turn right and then downward, plummeting toward Lamar Boulevard and Shoal Creek. When I was sixteen I decided I would ride my bicycle down this Ramp from Hell. Darn near put myself into the creek. On the other hand, I nearly pinned the 60-mph speedometer that ran off the front wheel, which gave me far more of a thrill than I could possibly have deserved. And no, I didn't even think about riding back up; I took Lamar half a mile north where things were a trifle flatter.

• I got my first email account in 1985, through MCI Mail. A box cost something like $35 a year; each email cost fifty cents, and you could write to people who didn't have an email account for a buck and a half. (They'd print it and mail it for you.) Never once got spammed, either.

• I have played ice hockey exactly once: on a frozen-over parking lot in central Massachusetts, without benefit of skates. The pain has since gone away.

• We wore uniforms when I was in high school, and part of that uniform was a striped tie. I never did get the hang of tying it, and eventually succumbed to the lure of a clip-on. Since it was excruciatingly obvious, I decided to call attention to it even further by fastening it down to the front of my shirt, not with the usual tac or bar, but with a standard paper clip. That year I stopped off a couple afternoons a week at a friend's house on the way home; said friend's sister (twelve-ish) was highly displeased with the paper clip, and actually gave me a proper (if oversized) tie bar, which I still have. I was 15 at the time; eventually, I figured out that her motive may have been something other than merely improving the state of my grooming, and by "eventually" I mean "some time within the last year." I have, however, learned how to do a decent four-in-hand.

• I tend to keep consumer products for incredibly long periods of time. My blender was acquired in 1983; my vacuum cleaner in 1976; my "big" stereo system in 1974; my stapler (an Ace Clipper) in 1969.
  

I suspect I can come up with five more the next time this comes around.

In the 1950s, Chrysler came up with a less-than-brilliant idea: they would develop a version of their standard Dodge sedan that would, they thought, appeal to women. I once described it thusly:

The La Femme, however, doesn't quite meet the contemporary definition of a "chick car," which is a non-gender-specific vehicle bought predominantly by women because allegedly men won't drive it, or at least won't want to be seen in it. Associate Blowhard Donald Pittenger has an interesting piece on the subject which, like most bloviation on the subject (including this), really doesn't answer the question of how they got to be chick cars in the first place.

David W. Boles' Urban Semiotic offers a definition and ten candidates:

Never seen a Corvette or a Lamborghini do that. (Then again, apart from videotape, I've never seen a Lamborghini do anything.) One of the cars he mentions is the Nissan Maxima, presumably a blow to my self-respect, since Gwendolyn, an Infiniti I30, was the Maxima's snootier sister back in the day.

One of Mr Pittenger's commenters notes:

Steve Miller would be appalled:

I should point out here that the women I tend to fall for generally ignore these considerations; a salon staffer performing a routine pedicure has no way of knowing that this particular right foot, strappy sandal notwithstanding, is solid lead up to about here and can punch the loud pedal with considerable vigor.

God, as Albert Einstein noted, does not play dice with the universe, but I suspect He's not above short-sheeting some of us now and then, jokester that He is. And when I get a packet from these folks * on the first day of a three-day ice storm, I have to figure that somewhere beyond the background noise there's a celestial giggle.

Which got louder when I opened the gas bill, I suspect.

* Link may not be safe for work.

Gilbert Arenas and the Washington Wizards got here before the sleet, and the turnout at the game was pretty respectable for a Friday night with an ice storm going on: paid attendance was 16,899, and the radio team estimated 6500 actually showed up. The Wizards showed some ice of their own in the second quarter, going from an 8-point lead to an 8-point deficit, but they made it up quickly in the last couple of minutes, and it was tied 51-51 at the half. No Third-Quarter Drought™ either; the Hornets led after three, 76-73, and they made it stick with four clutch free throws in the last twenty seconds. Final: Bees 104, Wizards 97, and here's the kicker: Arenas is justly famed for his closing-moment makes. He got two tries tonight, and both times he was denied.

All five starting Hornets scored in double figures: Desmond Mason with 22, Rasual Butler with 20, Devin Brown with 19, Marc Jackson with 11, and Tyson Chandler with 10 (and ten rebounds for the double-double). Jannero Pargo added 19 from the bench. The only other Bee to see action was Linton Johnson; he scored only three, but they were timely, and he picked up three boards and two assists. The Hornets shot 54.5 percent, and hit 50 percent of their 3-balls (8 of 16).

Arenas, as usual, led all scorers (he had 23); not as usual, he hit only 5 of 19 shots, including two treys. (The Wizards were 7 of 22 from beyond the arc.) DeShawn Stevenson added 22 points.

And tonight, both teams hope their flights take off: the Bees are bound for Milwaukee, and the Wizards are heading to San Antonio.

Who knew that the theme to Hawaii Five-O had lyrics?

(Well, Jalopnik, at least before I did.)

This year's Storm of the Century — we seem to get one about every two or three years, for what it's worth — has so far yielded up a smidgen of freezing rain, which was supposed to be the major threat, and a whole bunch of sleet. Precipitation for Day One was 0.28 inch of water equivalent, which is way more than one would expect for a serious ice storm; what happened, in this case, is that it got too cold for maximum freezing-rain production, and the stuff froze well before it hit the ground. The computer models, complained the National Weather Service in one of its Forecast Discussion segments, seriously underestimated the speed with which the Arctic air mass descended upon us. (I mention this because there are plenty of folks out there who have been led to believe that computer models have near-divine authority.) It's still pretty nasty out there, and the precipitation will continue for another day or so, but I'm recording this one as a bullet partially dodged: at worst, a minor flesh wound.

The background:

• My driveway is rather steep.

• The person who throws the local newspaper route is hard-pressed to get the paper more than a foot or so up the driveway.

• There's a heck of a lot of frozen stuff out there right now.
  

The combination of these factors led to a dilemma this morning. The newspaper, in its plastic bag, got to approximately its usual point this morning; however, ice on the surface caused it to slide, slide, and slide some more, down to the end of the driveway and about a foot into the street itself. No way was I going to follow it down there: even if I made it without breaking my fool neck, how was I going to climb back up?

So I got down the garden rake from its hanger on the garage wall, positioned myself just this side of the curb, and stretched. The paper wasn't frozen in place, yet, so with a few semi-deft motions, I flipped over the rake, scooped up the paper, and flung it northward toward the manhole that covers the sewer line, which is perhaps unsurprisingly not covered with ice. Mission accomplished.

As a Brilliant Solution, this does not rank with my escape from the petroleum tanker in '85, but I'll take any little victories I can get.

Finally hearing Love, a reimagining, if you will, of the Beatles' recorded catalogue done originally at the behest of the Cirque du Soleil guys, reminded me that last fall I'd gotten a copy of the enormous Recording the Beatles book, and it's about time I filled you in on some of the details.

This item caught my eye at once. It's a letter from Chief Engineer Bill Livy to Studio Manager Alan Stagg relaying George Martin's misgivings about EMI's new 8-track tape recorders, dated 14 May 1968:

In the end, the Beatles' fascination with new technology overrode George Martin's concerns — they recorded "Hey Jude" that summer at Trident Studios on eight tracks — and they requested an 8-track machine from EMI for the remote recording of the Let It Be project. EMI for some reason balked, and George Harrison, who had bought an 8-track machine of his own, arranged to have it delivered to Apple HQ, though by then EMI had had a change of heart, or something. The Abbey Road sessions were all done on 8-track.

One recurring story about "Hey Jude" is that about three minutes into the track you can hear John grumbling an expletive. Malcolm Toft, Trident's house engineer, explained what happened:

It was more neatly excised on the Love remix, but then we have better tools today; I once managed to edit the click-THUMPs out of a cracked 45 to get a passable CD copy, and I'm hardly in George Martin's league.

And then there's this:

Recording the Beatles, by Kevin Ryan and Brian Kehew, is available from Curvebender Publishing. "Curve Bender," incidentally, was the nickname of the EMI RS56 Universal Tone Control, a three-band equalizer with adjustable center frequencies, gain, and width.

Senator Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) has introduced something she calls the "Football Fairness Act of 2007", S. 249, which would grant professional football a limited exemption to the antitrust laws: just enough of one to permit NFL owners to oppose the move of one of their teams, such as the San Francisco 49ers, who by sheerest coincidence are seeking a new stadium in Santa Clara.

This, of course, assumes that NFL owners, thus empowered, would vote to block any movement by the 49ers, an assumption which I think is unwarranted. This take by SFist seems most reasonable:

In other words, Feinstein is basically, as my father used to say, "blowing off head steam."

I'm waiting to see if anyone from Washington state introduces a similar bill to insure "fairness" for basketball teams.

Update, 3:30 pm: Brian J. Noggle sees down this slippery slope.

The Hornets-Bucks game tonight has been postponed; weather isn't bad in Milwaukee — a little bit of snow — but the Hornets' charter flight, which was supposed to have left last night after the Wizards game, wasn't able to take off from Will Rogers World Airport, and some time around 1:30 this afternoon they threw in the presumably-frozen towel.

The game will be made up at some date to be determined. In the meantime, the Bees will be here in iced-over Oklahoma City, waiting for the arrival of the Orlando Magic on Tuesday.

Faster Than The World wants your vote for Best Fake Band. There are fifty nominees; I am surprised and delighted to see that my choice was (1) not running last and (2) had more votes than just mine.

You have through Sunday evening to vote. And the Monkees are not eligible; FTTW management and staff have determined that despite their Prefab Four origins, Peter, Davy, Micky and Mike were in fact a real band.

Update, 12:50 pm: Voting will close at 3 pm Eastern on 14 January.

Still a weird sight: the sky is illuminated by zillions of little ice particles, and then out of the not-blue, a lightning strike. I can't imagine ever getting used to that.