An old-style hangman, or a motivated citizen, can recommend the proper support.

But then, how do you know if he's local? This GeoCommons map will tell you. At least, it will tell you where he was in 2004.

(Via Rocketboom.)

And even more cosmetic crap:

Do me a favor: just don't call it a "fecial."

(Via Scribal Terror.)

Some people can pull this off, but I can't:

This poor leper will hide in his kitchen and dine on finger foods.

I'm not quite sure why this is true. I have less of an issue dining alone when I'm on the road, perhaps because I sense that I have no choice in the matter — but then, I sense that I have no choice in the matter even if I'm just round the corner.

Still, it has to be something of a relief when the wait staff don't immediately brand you as a pariah.

Last summer I grumbled about the new printer's insistence on gen-you-wine IBM ribbons and how it checks a barcode on the actual ribbon spool. Eventually, of course, you get used to this sort of thing, and the fact that IBM is asking a 40-percent premium for its branded ribbons — well, they are producing about a 50-percent improvement in actual lifespan, so I'm not complaining.

Then again, I'm not Trini, who objects to this sort of thing on principle. "What would it do," she wondered, "if it misread the code?" Brandishing a Sharpie with wicked precision, she drew a few extra lines on the spool, and then reloaded the ribbon. In a flash the little LCD screen scolded her: BARCODE DAMAGED : INSTALL NEW IBM RIBBON.

At this point, you have one option only: pull a replacement ribbon from stock, chalk up another twentysomething dollars on the ledger, and resume. Interestingly, the printer reprinted, of its own electronic volition, the page on which the ribbon failure had occurred. These machines are getting too damn smart in some ways, while remaining spectacularly dumb in others. Maybe if we keep this machine for 25 years — wouldn't be the first such — we can run it for Congress: it should fit right in.

Don't you know, if you dance, you dance 'til a quarter to three, you'll knock it off about 2:45.

Daddy G isn't in attendance, but Kehaar is around somewhere, and where he is, there will be the Carnival of the Vanities #245. (He is around somewhere, right?)

But so much for that idea:

"It's clobberin' time," said Benjamin J. Grimm; Susan Storm opted not to be seen at this time.

My father would have been eighty years old today, and I'm pretty sure he would have liked to have made it that far, if only to cock a further snook at the physician who shrugged and said "We can keep him alive one more year" — back around 1999.

An ornery cuss, you might think, and you'd be right. And tasked with raising five children from the very core of boomerdom, he worked diligently at being a hardass.

Today the hardass is derided as some sort of atavistic throwback to the Cro-Magnon, superfluous in the age of Shiny Happy People — until something needs to be done in a hurry. (There are those who believe that nothing should be done in a hurry; their moral center is the United Nations, which by design is incapable of anything resembling speed.)

But let's say you're faced with something like this:

Because that would be a hardass response, and that sort of thing is simply not done. Besides, some entities not officially classified as bugs might come along and lay claim to a few crystals here and there, and it would be so wrong to deny them. (I speak as someone who scraped a few off the side back in the day; it pretty much killed my sweet tooth.)

The essence of hardassery is that stopping the unwanted behavior comes first; if you're lucky, you might be shown the error of your ways later on, but right now you're getting a dose of aversion therapy. (If you're an errant child, said dose might be applied directly to your backside.) This is simply a recognition of the well-established principle that anyone able to feel pain is at least somewhat trainable. There's a significant the-buck-stops-here component as well, anathema to those whose modus operandi relies on appeals of unfavorable judgments.

In an era distinguished by endless wails of "You're not the boss of me!" the hardass reminds you, well, we'll just see about that. And every time we lose one, we sink a little bit farther into the muck.

Woe betide the Brit whose new house actually has enough power outlets. Why, he's not doing his part for the environment:

My 60-year-old three-bedroom home has a mere twelve, including the 220 line for the range. Seventeen would be a major improvement, 38 a dream come true. Then again, I live alone:

I'd love to blame the children, but I have a television, a DVD player, a clock-radio, a radio without a clock, two lamps and an electric fan in my bedroom.

Still to be answered: how installing fewer outlets is supposed to discourage people from buying electrical gizmos. Are the Power Strip Police going to come and take away your extension cords?

(Via Fark.)

There was real live sun this afternoon, something there hasn't been a lot of lately, so I spread a blanket on the grass and did a brief Vitamin D-gathering session, the chores actually having been completed for once.

About three minutes into my semi-slumber came a cry from the north: "Oh, my God!" Sounded like a twelve-year-old. I've heard it before, but I've not been inclined to check out its origin. Still, there's something disconcerting about this sort of expostulation, even though it was fairly unlikely (though not completely impossible) that I had motivated it by my resemblance to an albino walrus.

So I had to listen to the entire conversation, which turned out to be older child threatening younger child with something along the lines of "Wait until Mom sees this mess!" Mom did eventually enter the thread, and she was not pleased. Or so it seemed; after a couple of sentences, the hitherto-unheard sound of a lawn mower next door drowned her out, and eventually I stretched, pulled a few weeds within easy reach, folded up my blanket (not especially neatly) and went back into the house to scrape up something for dinner.

I probably don't watch enough DVDs to justify a subscription to Netflix, and given the dilatory nature of my viewings — well, this is the sort of thing I mean:

(Should you be curious, this is the film in question.)

But my idiosyncrasies aside, I can still understand Blythe's perspective:

Sweet indeed. Maybe someone will come up with good downloadable popcorn, as distinguished from that horrid toxic-waste-dump one pops into the microwave oven. (I can always pick up Twizzlers at the grocery, although my movie nosh of choice remains Raisinets.)

From the instructions for the remote to my little LCD HDTV:

Of course, some of us prefer the luxury of a dedicated DVD rewinder.

As Sleds O' Fun go, it's hard to beat a Ferrari — if you can afford one, and you probably can't. I certainly can't. And you'd be forgiven for saying "Well, they ought to be wonderful, for that much money."

With thoughts like this in mind, Winding Road has come up with a new data point called the Speed per Dollar Index, and it is calculated thusly:

(Horsepower ÷ Weight) x 10,000 ÷ Price Point x 100,000 = SpD

Rationalization:

And the Veyron, which offers 1001 hp, weighs 4162 lb and costs $1.3 million, comes in with a Speed per Dollar index of 185 — about 1/11 that of the less-exalted Jeep Grand Cherokee SRT-8.

Winding Road concedes that this index doesn't address handling, or the lack thereof, but all else being equal, cheap speed is better than expensive speed, or at least less pricey.

For the sake of amusement, here are the indices for my last two cars, as calculated by yours truly:

Sandy (2000 Mazda 626 LX): (130/2960) x 10000 ÷ 20225 x 100000 = 2172 SpD
Gwendolyn (2000 Infiniti I30): (227/3342) x 10000 ÷ 30519 x 100000 = 2226 SpD

Which is what I'd expect: the Mazda was short on power, but weighed less and cost a lot less, so its Speed per Dollar was almost the same as the Infiniti's.

(Via Autoblog.)

Actually, it looks more like a cheap convenience-store lighter, or maybe a cuttlefish:

It is, in fact, an MP3 player in Sony's eternal (or at least endless) Walkman line, and one of these showed up Friday at slightly less expense than one might expect. (Amazon.com is selling the 1GB version for a stiff $189.95; Woot was selling it — briefly — for $39.99 plus the invariant $5 shipping. Mine is a 4GB model.) It is, though, almost exactly the size of that lighter.

How much you can cram into four gigabytes is, of course, dependent on file size. As an experiment, I sent it a few actual .wav files, and they take up every bit as much room in flash memory as they do on hard disc. They do work, though. At the present time, I have 574 tracks loaded into about two-thirds of the available space. (I tend to encode stereo tracks at variable bit rates, which can slide all the way up to 320, and mono tracks at a fixed 96.)

Two things that came out better than expected:

• Once you figure out where it is, the FM tuner is pretty decent, and it will find presets for you. (Of course, you have to delete the ones you don't want.)

• The player features an active noise-canceling feature: whatever background grunge it hears, it generates a negative signal to counterbalance it. I haven't tried it with the lawn mower yet, but it's pretty effective on the attic fan. (There's a cost — about 25-percent higher battery consumption — but that still leaves you with about 40 hours on a charge.)
  

This being a Sony, cool(ish) design is valued more greatly than workable interfaces, and Sony's SonicStage application, besides being Windows-specific, is quite a bit clunkier than, say, iTunes. Still, it transfers at close to full USB 2.0 speed, and there's a "Don't Disconnect" message on the OLED display when things are happening, which is handy if you're not paying attention, which I'm usually not.

And the sound is quite good. Two different sizes of earbuds are provided; there's an equalizer of sorts built in. I expect this will be my backup audio device on the next World Tour, feeding an FM transmitter to Gwendolyn's Bose system. But first, I have to find 300 more songs. (Piece of cake.)

Jason Bontrager, commenting at Jane Galt's place, suggested this solution, if solution it be, to the Social Security/Medicare headaches soon to be visited upon the American taxpayer:

Not surprisingly, this package wasn't universally hailed. I tend to suspect that I won't ever draw anything from Social Security anyway, but I'm still a fair number of years away from retirement, unless the Gods of Powerball prove to be more generous than I anticipate. I will note, however, that were FICA withholding discontinued, I'd have roughly three times as much to stash into my 401(k). And if nothing else, this proposal would provide the acid test for the libertarian doctrine that the reason health care costs so damned much is simply that so much of it is paid for by government that the marketplace is severely crippled.

Yeah, I know: boring subject. Life is like that sometimes.

Once a week, we take a dip into the referrer logs — given some of the grungier material known to lurk therein, we wouldn't dare skinny-dip on the premises — and we pop out a dozen or so of the weirder requests by Googlers and Askers and other petitioners.

how many people in Chesterfield eat pizza:  All but two: one's lactose-intolerant and can't deal with the cheese, and the other cleans pizza ovens for a living and wouldn't get near the stuff.

sob ordinance southington ct:  It is time for you to stop all your sobbing, you SOB.

howard kaylan is under 6' tall:  He's a Turtle. What did you expect?

what is soap scum:  Very often on the shower curtain you will find this residue.

Stephen King writing tendencies:  This is true. He definitely has a tendency to write.

girls in bikinis knock on my door and ask for condoms:  Um, when did this become the Penthouse letters page?

Flight Attendants Have to Wear Pantyhose:  The female ones, maybe.

how to PERSUADE girlfriend Naked Photos:  Bad idea, especially if you're going to break up, which you will when she finds out you've been taking pictures on the sly.

is AARP non-partisan:  They are when they think they can get a better deal by playing both sides against the middle.

8 inch penis club:  Too short to use as a club, I think.

does burnt popcorn whiten teeth:  Perhaps on the part that doesn't break off.

drunken moose oklahoma city:  Geez, the panhandlers are getting brazen these days.

characteristics of the seven dwarfs:  Well, for one thing, they're not overly tall.

formerly fat chaz:  Let's not be jumping the gun here.

"California tumbles into the sea / That'll be the day I go back to Annandale." Steely Dan wasn't talking about this, but they could have been. The scene is Bard College, Annandale, New York:

About as outré as I get — in several senses of the word — is Louise Nevelson, who boxed up the detritus of everyday life and repurposed it as sculpture. I think I understood some of what she was doing: certainly she provided context for her boxes, even for her non-boxes, and at no time (and I've been to two different Nevelson exhibitions, one of which was concurrent with actual study) did I feel that she had assembled a broken allegory that resisted my interpretation.

Still, if Nevelson, who has since passed from the scene, was close to the edge, where is the current state of the Art? Out trying to preempt criticism, I suspect:

While this particular phenomenon may have escaped Becker and Fagen's notice, it didn't get past Orwell:

There are times when I think that defecation is the whole point.

(Suggested by Mark Alger.)

Volkswagen has been running this mock letter in a print ad for the Passat 2.0 Turbo:

Dear YNH: You owe me no apologies. However, you owe thirty grand still on a four-cylinder car, so maybe saving a little gas might not be a bad idea after all.

Except, of course, when money is involved.

Me, I want one of those Bimmers with the removable truck bed.

News Item: A federal appeals court on Monday found that a new Federal Communications Commission policy penalizing accidentally aired expletives was invalid, saying it was "arbitrary and capricious" and might not survive First Amendment scrutiny. The 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals did not, however, outlaw the policy outright. In a 2-1 ruling, it found in favor of a Fox Television-led challenge to the policy and returned the case to the FCC to let the agency try to provide a "reasoned analysis" for its new approach to indecency and profanity. It added it was doubtful the FCC could do so.

Top Ten talking points in the FCC's "reasoned analysis" for its new approach to indecency and profanity:

10. We hate getting letters from that twerp Wildmon
    
9. Charles Rocket had a son, didn't he?
   
8. If the satellite-radio merger fails we may get Howard Stern back
   
7. Suppose CBS wants to stick another camera up Katie Couric's keister?
   
6. Dr. Dobson has threatened to cut off the checks
   
5. George Carlin is still alive
   
4. It gives us something to do while we wait for Internet radio to die
   
3. Rosie's bound to find a new gig eventually
   
2. We gotta find something on that pesky Jeff Jarvis
   
1. Have you seen Janet Jackson lately? Whole new wardrobe
   

(Via that pesky Jeff Jarvis.)

Addendum: Text of the decision here. (Via Justin Levine.)

Although les chats might say it differently in France.

(From Boing Boing via Steph Mineart.)

Addendum: Over at Lynn's place, Fillyjonk suggests: "I think it would be funnier to have a sign outside of a dietician's office that says 'NO YOU CAN NOT HAS CHEEZBURGER'."

You can get one heck of a house in Oklahoma City for three hundred thousand dollars.

Or this record player.

(Title sort of explained here. Via Lynn S.)

As suggested by Joel at In Theory, I've been playing with AAA's Fuel Cost Calculator, into which you plug Point A, Point B, and your automotive details, and get back how much precious fuelstuffs you'll be burning and how much it will cost you to do so.

I am not quite as impressed as I might have been, because apparently the calculator assumes I'll get pre-2008 EPA highway mileage, 28 mpg, which is believable, and that I'll pay $3.049 a gallon, which isn't, unless prices take a serious tumble in the next four weeks. (Regular is edging back below $3 here, but if I'm going to get anywhere near the expected mileage, I'm going to have to be using premium, and that's a good twenty cents higher.)

They has a bucket.

And by "they" I mean this guy and also this guy.

And another one, and another one, now that I'm thinking about it.

Not her, though.

I haven't had a TrackBack go through to a TypePad-based site in over a month. Is somebody trying to tell me something? (In this same period, some Movable Type blogs, and almost all WordPress blogs, are still accepting my pingage.)

As opening sentences go, this is a grabber:

Yes, boys and girls, it's a World of Warcraft romance, and so far it's working. There's one minor issue, though:

Well, it beats telling them you were out punting gnomes.

Ian Birnbaum is wondering where his comic mojo went:

I think what Mr Birnbaum is discovering is that one's sense of humor migrates a bit: its center wanders about as experiences pile up, and the edges get a mite ragged here and there. Especially there [gestures].

Mark Twain figured out a long time ago that the secret source of humor is not joy, but sorrow, and the worse things get, the greater the potential for yocks. I can't imagine anyone of a jocular bent, even a comparatively gentle soul like, say, Garrison Keillor, scratching around for material today. And let's face it: were it not for pathetic ass-covering politicians, Stephen Colbert would be doing the weather in Dubuque.

The ultimate extension of this premise, of course, is so-called gallows humor. We don't execute a lot of people these days — at least, none of the ones I want — and their sentences are normally carried out behind very thick walls so it's impossible to know for sure, but I have always believed that if you don't actually go insane as your time approaches, the quality of your remarks is bound to go up sharply. And when the Nanny State finally achieves the dominance it desires and I'm sent before a firing squad for extreme disloyalty, seditious remarks and ownership of a George Foreman grill, I plan to ask the riflemen if those things have trigger locks. Because if I have to die, and I assume I do — and if I don't, I'm wasting a crapload of money on insurance — I intend to die laughing.

There's a mysterious lid atop Gwendolyn's center stack, easily openable, covering nothing of significance. The manual says it's a storage bin, and does not elaborate further, except to say that you shouldn't operate it while actually driving. What it is, of course, is the housing for the factory navigation system, which wasn't ready in time for the beginning of the 2000 model year, and I am loath to fish a nav unit out of a 2001 model and shove it into the little covered box. For one thing, it's likely to cost me a ton of money, and I'm already spending a ton of money sprucing her up for the summer and fixing everything that looks fixable. For another, these old-style nav systems run off CDs (occasionally DVDs) that are obsolete about twenty minutes after you open the package. One of those new satellite-based systems, then? Maybe. Or maybe not:

So imagine how far behind they'd leave a seven-year-old contraption that hides under a hatch. I think I can do without. (The photo above was swiped from Edmunds.com; it's actually a shot of the nav system from a 2001 I30.)

If you're planning to swipe stuff from the Home Depot, you might consider visiting the Midwest City store, which recently fired four staffers for catching thieves:

One has to assume that this is due to fear of litigation: the company presumably doesn't want to be sued by someone falsely accused. (Or, for that matter, by someone who isn't falsely accused but figures he can impress twelve people who couldn't figure out how to get out of jury duty.) The price of that fear: thieves having free run of the place, and employees catching flak for low loss-prevention scores that they're not allowed to do anything about.

And it's not like there was a whole lot of doubt in this particular case:

Down the street at Circuit City a few months back, a chap was reprimanded for having the temerity to pursue a couple of urchins who were trying to make off with a brace of Xbox 360s.

Is there a solution to this? I don't know. I don't think anyone's quite ready for arming the entire store staff. On the other hand, a trail of dead shoplifters might have some small but measurable deterrent value.

This situation is less hypothetical than you might think:

To my knowledge, there are four wooters at 42nd and Treadmill, and two of them weren't actually monitoring the situation. The other two (in more or less adjacent offices) did in fact score Broken Ogre Combs, and they did so rather loudly, as I recall.

Note to the mythical Average Guy: You were wondering how it is that you get by with three pairs of shoes while your girlfriend has sixty-seven and says she needs more. It's not necessarily a desire to dominate the closet in some domestic version of Risk; nor is it the elevation of the mundane to the status of an icon. (Well, it could be, if everything she has came from Payless except for those CFM pumps she saw on Zappos and bought with your credit card.)

What is closer to the mark, I believe, is that while you wear those old Chuck Taylors as close to 24/7 as possible, she goes through several different pairs, styles even, in a single day. Rachel corroborates:

She doesn't say whether she drives barefoot — which, incidentally, is not actually illegal unless one is barefoot up to one's chin, as it were — but I wouldn't be the least bit surprised.

This is, I might add, a major reason why you need not fear the succubus: at some point she'll change shoes, and there's your opportunity to escape.

Addendum: This obsession, if obsession it be, does not affect Syaffolee.

This is one of the kinder things Jay Shoemaker said about a BMW 5-series sedan in The Truth About Cars:

I'd hate to have to figure out how to turn off the traction control.

The old-fashioned nonpower reel mower is making a comeback, reports Brian Sargent:

Me, I'm holding out for a hybrid. Then again, my own mower is nominally self-propelled — there's a belt to drive the front wheels — but I hardly ever use the propulsion feature: I just push. Maybe when this thing dies a horrible death....

Some worthless lump of pond scum (may he die in a chemical fire) has hijacked an informe.com forum to spam the world with drug offers, and the most annoying of them, from the standpoint of link lust, is the one that begins "can greyhounds take amoxicillin".

Since this has already been spread around a bit, I'm taking the liberty of linking to an actual abstract on the subject, with the hope that future Googlers will find it instead of his spam pages.

The abstract (which is available here) is called "Effect of feeding on plasma antibiotic concentrations in greyhounds given ampicillin and amoxycillin by mouth," by Watson, A.D., and Egerton, J.R. Regular users of PubMed may already have seen this abstract.

You have to hope that these guys have done the math:

Does this mean that on the third, they'll cut down three trees, in simple arithmetical progression — or that they will double the cutting, thereby doing four? If the latter, they'll cut down eight trees on the 4th, 16 on the 5th, and they'll have wiped out every tree in the Southern Hemisphere before Boxing Day.

(Via Tim Blair.)

Not three of them in a row, anyway:

Unlike the dreaded bonitis, Wiiitis is apparently non-lethal:

There hasn't been a game-system-related disease since a number of seizures were reported by avid players of Grand Mal Auto a few years back.

Remember that $300,000 turntable?

Here's a pair of million-dollar speakers to go with it.

Of course, if you want 5.1 surround — but never mind, let's not go there.

Once upon a time I had a 1975 Toyota Celica named Dymphna, and she needed a new starter. The shop looked up the part number, and was horrified to find that there were two different starters applicable to that model year: Toyota had made a running change during that year, and the Dymmer was a June car, so she'd get the newer version. Which would be no big deal, except that the change was so late in the year that the supply of version 1.1 starters was never all that big, and in her 190,000 miles with me she chewed up three of them. I have long suspected that the fourth unit was her original starter, rebuilt.

A curious little contretemps of this sort befell Gwendolyn this week. I was having some A/C work done, and in the process of mounting the compressor the tech inadvertently bent the low-pressure hose. No big deal, they said, we'll put in a new one, no charge, but we'll have to order it from the parts depot, and in the meantime, you just keep driving that G35 we lent you. Of course, I'm fond enough of the G to make this a nonissue. The new hose came in, and it didn't fit the compressor: eventually they decided that the compressor itself was damaged. They called around to local Nissan stores and located another compressor: still mismatched. Finally Nissan/Infiniti HQ in Tennessee airlifted some parts that fit.

After I got home, I pulled up the online service material at Alldata, and the part number for the low-pressure hose is the same as the one on my invoice (no charge, as promised), but there's an intimidating notation at its side: "To 9/00." Apparently Nissan screwed around with this model all year: my car is late enough to have the side airbags, which weren't available at first, and the later instrument panel (with only one dimmer control instead of two), but too early to have the nav system.

Oh, well. Even supermodels sometimes wind up in the wrong size — briefly.

Yes, we have a tie again, but then it's been a couple of weeks since we had a QOTW at all.

This first one is a long one, but Will has a long title: 7th Degree Bi-Cosmic Hermeticist and First Deputy in Charge of Doctrinal Enforcement.

Which I've always suspected. Not that I'm exactly enlightened or anything.

Now he tells me.

This is second mostly because I typed the other one in first. Here's Blythe:

Now she tells me.

Trini was in love, sort of. The ranking hoonette at the shop, she really would like to get rid of her nasty old truck and get something actually fun to drive: at the top of her list is the Spec-V variant of the SE-R version of Nissan's compact Sentra sedan.

Yesterday she stumbled upon the next best thing: it wasn't a Spec-V, but it was an SE-R, it was here in town, it was only three years old, it hadn't been driven to death, and the payments would have fit into her budget. Such a deal, I said, and she went off to make some phone calls.

The thrill was gone by the time she returned. The payments, not a problem: but her insurance would nearly double. (The premium, in fact, would be nearly $100 more than the car payment each month.) So much for budget-fitting. I've never seen a woman I wasn't actually dating so disillusioned so quickly.

Maybe I can talk her into a nice used G20: same engine, not so highly tuned, possibly less suspicious to insurance guys.

The sale of ABC Radio to Citadel is scheduled to close next week, and the FCC approved the deal on condition that Citadel spin off eleven radio stations. Two of them are in this market: KKWD (Wild 104.9) and KINB (La Indomable 105.3). The stations will be transferred to something called "The Last Bastion Station Trust," headed by Elliott Evers, and Mr Evers has been given his marching orders [link goes to a Microsoft Word file] as follows:

Not incidentally, the transfer will eliminate the need for Citadel's ongoing waiver of market-concentration rules to continue to operate Chisholm Trail Broadcasting's KQOB (Bob FM 96.9) under a local-marketing agreement.

So what happens to these two smallish stations? (And now you know why the Sports Animal was moved from 104.9 to 97.9, swapping with Wild, some months back.) Nothing, at first; but sooner or later, Evers is going to have to find buyers, and those buyers may not wish to maintain the existing formats, especially since both stations fall well into the bottom half of the local ratings.

In the meantime, if you're a minority or a female (or both), you are encouraged — "strongly," yet — to put in a bid.

Sya has:

Says this eleven-year veteran: "There's a book? With tricks?"

Funny thing about that learning curve: the more you know, the longer it gets. That light at the end of the tunnel? A tear in the fabric of space/time, caused by a MySQL error.

Around 1960, PacTel installed a phone booth in the middle of the Mojave Desert, about 70 miles from Las Vegas, not particularly close to Zzyzx Road. In 1997, the booth gained a measure of Net notoriety when a Web site devoted to it sprang up. The site, and then the booth, picked up traffic; in 2000 the booth was taken down at the request of the National Park Service, citing environmental concerns stemming from that traffic. The site, however, lived on, and eventually filmmaker John Putch dropped by:

And so it came to pass that John Putch, on a budget of $38,469.49, brought forth Mojave Phone Booth, the movie, which played tonight at deadCENTER. And this is exactly the point he wanted to make: that people, strangers so far away, actually do connect in that weird, surreal setting. I've always thought that communication was far easier once you detach yourself as much as possible from the everyday, and Mojave Phone Booth is an object lesson in that detachment: the characters who would never discuss matters with the people closest to them will willingly talk to Greta, whoever she may be — altruist? therapist? the voice of God? — at the other end of the line.

The script, by Putch and Jerry Rapp, pulls off the difficult task of getting inside these characters without making them into caricatures. In the wrong hands, this could have been the sort of overwrought melodrama that gives away all its secrets in the trailer. Instead, the details accumulate, slowly but surely, the complexities unfolding, the stories unexpectedly intertwining. And this version of Las Vegas, the city these people flee to find a voice in the desert, is decidedly blue-collar and downscale: that fabled nightlife is a job, nothing more.

That reference to the budget, incidentally, isn't an apologia: it's a boast. Mojave Phone Booth is beautifully shot, its desert scenes balanced on the edge between compelling and disturbing, its Vegas scenes appropriately glitz-free. And the thread of hope which connects its characters proves, ultimately, to be far stronger than it seems.

There's only one thing that bothers me particularly about the deadCENTER Film Festival, running through this weekend in downtown Oklahoma City: it is impossible to see everything being offered and still hold down a day job — at least, a day job like mine, in which the 40-hour mark is reached on Friday morning (or in the case of this week, Thursday afternoon). That said, though, the Festival has grown considerably in its seven years, big enough to have actual staff, and the 140 or so films that are being screened across downtown — there are half a dozen different venues — will be seen by a few thousand folks who'd never get to see them otherwise, which is a Good Thing in spite of any minor inconveniences I might suffer.

I did learn in prior years that peeling off a few bucks (this year it's $8) for each and every screening is a major pain; this year I was prescient enough to snag a Screening Pass ($50) in advance. (Well, actually, I got two, inasmuch as I hate to go alone.) I might not attend as many as seven screenings this year, so this saves me no money, but the convenience is considerable, and there's always the Support Your Local [insert name of cultural organization] factor.

Last night at the Harkins, there were some, um, technical difficulties at one screening, which caused some mild tittering (and, briefly, some serious aural discomfort) among audience members. Once underway, though, there were no further glitches. And as low-level moviehouse catastrophes go, this sort of thing beats the hell out of falling ceiling tiles.

Addendum: Dwight and Sarah are trying to attend as many events as possible and are duly posting their adventures.

I am shocked ... shocked! ... to find that there is deception in the online-dating market:

After a little more poking around, I came up with this survey:

Things I wonder about:

• It seems unlikely that a man would understate his height. But why would a woman fudge this statistic? Would a woman of six feet think she'd stand a better chance at five-ten? Does four-eleven get rounded up to five-one?

• Apparently the likelihood of finding an accurate weight on a dating site is rather low. (I avoid the question myself by not owning a scale.)

• Do the people who misrepresent their ages invariably do so by shaving off a few years, or are there some who might actually put on a year or two? (I'm imagining a 21-year-old who, fearful of being dismissed as immature, might choose to appear as 23 or 24. And it's probably a guy, since if he's anything like me, he'll be immature until he's 50.)
  

Still, these are comparatively white lies:

I wish to state for the record that I am not a midget.

So many spammers are using email addresses that look like bad Scrabble racks, it's almost news to see one that looks like a name these days.

Well, sort of a name. I got something this morning from gwendolyneroticprosopopoeia at rr.com, which, if it isn't a real address, darn well ought to be.

Contrary to popular belief, it ain't all Ozzie and Harriet down here:

And this might seem puzzling:

As your basic Southern (yes, I was born near Chicago, but I grew up in South Carolina fercrissake) right-wing death beast, I am compelled to admit that I thought BITCH the movie was flat wonderful, that I laughed a whole lot, that I was sitting right across from writer/director Lilah Vandenburgh during the screening and I'm sure she caught me doing a spit take during that line about VH1's 50 Most Important Bands for Poseurs. (Vandenburgh, incidentally, despite her gentle, kindly, JCPenney Petites vibe, can almost certainly kick my ass, and I expect her to threaten to do so when she reads this.)

And as a general rule, the only people around here who have their lips pressed to Dr. Dobson's derrière are the politicians, and we have no respect for them anyway.

Artist Sandow Birk, it seems, had stumbled across an old copy of Dante's 14th-century Divine Comedy, with illustrations by Gustave Doré. At some point Birk noted that Doré's engravings, while true to Dante's story, inevitably reflected a mid-19th-century sensibility as well, and maybe it's just possible to update the tale enough to reflect life at the beginning of the 21st. Working with writer Marcus Sanders, Birk, over a three-year period, completed the entire Comedy in three (of course) volumes, each presented as an art exhibition alongside his original drawings.

Sean Meredith knew Sandow Birk: the director had translated Birk's In Smog and Thunder, a tale of a Civil War between Northern and Southern California, into a 45-minute film back in 2003. And the Inferno, the first section of Dante's trilogy, seemed a natural. But a full-fledged CGI epic would cost zillions. Paul Zaloom, who had worked with Birk and Meredith on the Smog and Thunder project, and who knows puppets as well as anyone, suggested that the film be done in the style of Victorian "toy theatre," which would require a few hundred puppets but which could use Birk's drawings as sets.

Dante's Inferno, the film, premiered at Slamdance this past winter, and if you were wondering if the contemporary references mar the story, the answer is no: the original structure of the Inferno is not tampered with, and the punishments, updates notwithstanding, still are designed to fit the sins. And the look of it is simply marvelous: the fact that you're viewing a bunch of cardboard cutouts mounted on sticks doesn't occur to you at all after the first couple of minutes, and Birk's drawings on the big screen are, well, fiendishly clever. James Cromwell is the voice of Virgil, and he conveys wisdom, world-weariness, and occasional irritation, just as he should; Dermot Mulroney's Dante, appropriately, manages to sound simultaneously headstrong and scared spitless. It's a marvelous piece of work, gritty yet somehow uplifting; it was the last screening I caught at deadCENTER, and I can't think of a better finish to a splendid festival.

I am a big fan of both shortish skirts and strappy sandals, as I have probably mentioned entirely too often, but I don't quite get this open-at-the-toe hosiery, despite its construction of some "revolutionary Japanese yarn" that's supposed to keep you cool, thereby eliminating the major objection to hosiery in the summertime. A commenter noted: "The end of the stocking never coincides with the shape of your shoe, so you end up looking even dorkier than before," which seems logical to me. Maybe this would make more sense if it were cut off around the ankle, if you happened to own a pair of ankle-strap shoes. Moreover, if we're to believe some of the advertising these days, there are lots of women who will willingly put a lot of leg on display, but please, please don't look at their feet; they're never, ever going to consider wearing something like this. (And a not-so-perfunctory informal survey during this weekend's wandering about between film screenings didn't turn up a single person who really ought to wear it.)

Every month Automobile magazine reports on an auto auction, and I am somehow delighted to see some love for a car generally regarded as unlovable: at Barrett-Jackson in Palm Beach this spring, a '76 Ford Pinto (!) brought $12,650. And it wasn't a limited-edition sports model, either: it was a standard three-door hatchback (Ford preferred to call it a "coupe") with the base 2.3-liter four-banger and a three-speed automatic and barely 7000 miles on the clock. "This was one of the most talked-about cars of the entire weekend," reports Automobile's Dave Kinney; maybe they were talking about the gas tank. Then again, Pintos, being small, light rear-drivers, make pretty decent vintage racers, though I can't imagine someone turning an almost-new car into a racer when there are plenty of old boilers out there which would require little more work and cost lots less money.

Still: twelve thousand dollars. For a Ford Pinto. Adjusted for inflation, this is right about what it sold for in 1976.

How you complete that sentence probably depends on whether you've worked any substantial time in retail. I haven't, so I tend to think in terms of "... drunk" or " ... retarded," based on the last few phone calls that the irritated customer-service people (our customer-service people are always irritated, and having worked the phones myself a few months, I don't blame them) told me about. Others with more experience tend to be a bit less kind in their descriptions:

We have some of that too, though we usually don't have someone else to blame:

I went looking through my own desktop box, and under Control Panel / System / General I found a Support Information box, which tells me exactly whom to call and when they're open. Perhaps other manufacturers — this box was a custom job from PC Club — aren't quite as forthcoming about their support options. On the other hand, people, I suspect, will bring stuff back to the store for any reason whatsoever, no matter whose fault it is. Your dog peed on your keyboard? Demand a replacement. (It occurs to me that someone is now going to sue a hardware manufacturer for selling components that are not urine-resistant and failing to warn in BIG RED LETTERS that one should not whiz on one's computer. My apologies to the defendant.)

It's things like this that make me appreciate Woot:

They'll take it back if it's really, truly defective, but if you're just a bonehead — well, you've given me another way to complete that sentence.

Some fellator of diseased goats has set up a crapload of Yahoo! Groups for the purpose of spamming blogs with drug-sale offers; I've received rather a lot of TrackBack spam from his sorry ass. I sent a terms-of-service complaint to Yahoo! which, judging by the response, was not understood — or maybe Yahoo! doesn't consider this a TOS violation. Until such time as they excise this particular dingleberry, you might want to consider blocking as much Yahoo! Groups traffic as is technically feasible.

Once a week, I pick up ye olde SiteMeter, turn it upside down, and look at what falls out. Some of it, you get to look at.

foxwoods AND prostitution:  Both can cost you a lot of money in the long run.

the three stooges msdos download:  On the other hand, Shemp used a Mac.

repressing crossdress:  First, see if your outfit needs pressing. If it's still crinkled, you may have to repress it.

"hannity in a dress":  Probably needs ironing, too.

how do you make gatorade:  Step 1: Catch a gator.

thumbs up george bush:  Another reason not to shake hands with Karl Rove.

gilligan nude fake:  You better believe it, little buddy.

horny + immature:  Been there, been that.

first dorkmobile:  The 1950 Nash Rambler.

Dick Cheney is cooler than Hunter S. Thompson:  I dunno. Dr. Thompson is dead, so he's probably not generating a whole lot of heat.

red beetles and doritos:  What, are you too cheap to buy salsa?

ten sexual turn ons for married women:  If I knew any of those I might still be married.

"Maureen Dowd" dustbury:  Suddenly I feel a cold chill.

Never let it be said that Hillary can't overlook a little thing like impeachment. Remember Alcee Hastings?

It's enough to make you want Scooter Libby on the Supreme Court.

Jimmy Webb has given, maybe, the last interview on "MacArthur Park":

Any relation to Linda Ronstadt? A cousin, says Webb.

And no, he wasn't trying to be florid and metaphorical:

Count me as insufficiently venomous. I've always been fond of this song, over the top as it is; when Richard Harris died in 2002, I quipped that his voice sounded like W. H. Auden's face, "like a wedding-cake left in the rain." And yes, "Weird Al" Yankovic made fun of it: still, if you listen to "Jurassic Park," you'll hear that Yankovic went to considerable effort to replicate Webb's original arrangement, even the Hal Blaine drum fill in the last verse. You don't take that kind of care with something you don't respect.

Besides, it's still better than "Seasons in the Sun."

(Via Fark.)

Attila Girl contemplates the toeless hose I brought up yesterday, and she doesn't buy the premise:

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, I suspect, understands this premise: the wire services have carried zillions of photos of her in shortish — but not too shortish — dresses, but you never, ever see her in sandals. Nor is this a Republican phenomenon; for all I know, Nancy Pelosi may knock around in Birkenstocks at home, but in her capacity as Speaker, she's conservatively shod.

But I thought you might like to know: not everyone thinks Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, inflicted on the world forty years ago this month, is the greatest thing since plastic waffles. I've long argued that not only is it not the Best LP Ever, it's not even the best Beatles LP ever.

This is now almost sort of quantifiable. Dave Thompson writes in Goldmine (#702, 22 June 2007):

Or, as Jim DeRogatis once said:

Take that, Mr. Kite.

Does Vista support the USBeer port?

(Swiped from Steph Waller.)

Terry Teachout muses:

This does not, of course, explain why Hollywood females are similarly positioned to the left, unless they've been told that's their good side. And I suspect that there are legions of Lotharios Lite who will sleep with anyone who breathes, and possibly with those who don't.

Mort Sahl anticipated this decades ago. "Liberals," he said, "feel unworthy of their possessions."

And then he added, "Conservatives feel they deserve everything they've stolen."

You'll notice that there have been no announcements regarding World Tour '07. The reason for this is twofold:

1. In the past I have done a better job of ignoring budgetary limitations than I'm doing today, and it doesn't help that Gwendolyn's last trip to the shop cost somewhere around 55 percent of the projected cost of the tour. Yes, I have plastic to spare, but there's that little matter of paying it back.

2. I'm still apparently a tad skittish after the abrupt ending of World Tour '06, even though it proved not to be the abrupt ending of me, as some might have expected.
   

Yet somehow I feel I have to go, in the manner of the kid who falls off the bicycle: if I don't do it now, or at least soon, I'll never do it again, and we can't have that, can we?

So I'm thinking in terms of a smaller jaunt — say, 2500 miles or so instead of the usual 4000-plus — over ten or eleven days instead of sixteen or seventeen. Training wheels. That sort of thing.

First actual vacation day is the 9th of July. I hope to — I had better — have something to announce by then.

And there was crap, and the crap was as follows:

• Targus Travel Accessory Pouch (retail value $30.00)
  
• Magnetic "Shake" Flashlight ($9.99)
  
• Belkin Patriotic Mouse Pad ($1.00)
  
• Logitech EasyFit Connector ($3.00)
  
• Heart-shaped "Cupid" clock (2"x2") ($5.00)
  

And the actual retail price of this Showcase Barrel O' Crud is $48.99 $3.00.

Plus $5.00 shipping.

The more I think about this, the sillier it sounds:

When I was in the Army, most of us were more interested in sex than fighting, and we weren't even gay. (Maybe a few exceptions: we didn't ask, and they didn't tell, and that was that.)

How would this, um, stuff work?

Geez. A Pentagon body spray. And, being from the Pentagon, it would probably be $900 an ounce.

Terry asks the right question: "Would it be detected by gaydar?"

News Item: An Oklahoma City ice-cream man has been charged with indecent exposure after giving a would-be customer a look at his undone zipper on the city's south side.

Top Ten Verbal Responses to Indecent Exposure by Ice-Cream Men:

10. Hey, that ain't a Popsicle^® stick!
    
9. At this point, I don't care if you are happy to see me.
   
8. How long before it melts?
   
7. Let me guess: joint venture with Der Wienerschnitzel?
   
6. Um, no thanks, no frozen yogurt.
   
5. Which one's Ben and which one's Jerry?
   
4. This is no way to compete with Dairy Queen.
   
3. Yes, I'm sure the Health Department does require you to carry a thermometer — but not there.
   
2. Froze solid, did it?
   
1. So that's what they mean by "soft-serve."
   

May you all enjoy a month of sundaes.

There's a Do Not Call Registry, but you drop off after five years, and anyone with Caller ID (and rather a lot of people without it) can tell you that the Registry is more honored in the breach.

Which means a permanent solution is something like this:

I've got a whole database to upload come Inauguration Day.

Back in 2004, I had occasion to quote Cynthia Heimel thusly:

Cynthia, meet Lionel Shriver:

Ms Shriver clearly has a neck, and her voice is in no wise shrill. Then again:

(Via Jenny Davidson.)

From the first of June:

Yes, he is.

Let's see: Hybrids get good mileage. Diesels get good mileage. How about — a hybrid diesel?

Assuming these gallons are Imperial, as you might expect from a British writeup, we're looking at 58 miles per gallon from this little Frenchmobile should it ever come to the States. Not that I expect it to: Peugeot bailed out of the US market at the beginning of the 1990s.

(Via AutoblogGreen.)

Kurt Hochenauer (you know him from Okie Funk) devotes his op-ed space in the Gazette this week to one of the more risible events in recent Oklahoma City history: the kerfuffle over The Tin Drum, ten years ago this month.

DocHoc recalls:

Ah, if only we'd had blogs back in 1997!

Oh, wait:

I bring this up mostly to amplify Dr Hochenauer's last paragraph:

Jesus, I hope not. And there exist palpable disincentives: in March 1999 City Council and DA Bob Macy wound up forking over more than half a million dollars to settle lawsuits stemming from the police seizures of the video. Some of us have long memories, and for the rest of us, there are search engines.

Useful linkage: Charles Oliver's report from Reason (October 1997). This was before the settlements, but there's still a money quote: "The courts will eventually decide if authorities there have been too zealous in their pursuit of smut, and the city's younger citizens will, like Oskar, have a chance to consider if the adults around them are mad."

Addendum, 22 June: Michael Camfield, the ACLU staffer quoted in Dr Hochenauer's piece, sent a letter to the Gazette questioning the "lost his case" bit:

Split decision, maybe.

In Missouri, at least, saying it's so doesn't make it so:

Brian J. Noggle approves:

Given lawmakers' ability to find justification for damn near anything in the Constitution's Commerce clause, I am not entirely reassured.

Evidently I'm out of the mainstream on matters like this:

I suppose this might put off the sort of guy whos