A complaint from Dennis the Peasant:

Which is, of course, the only way to view a downturn in traffic: studied disdain.

Rather a lot of Google Images searches that landed here made no sense whatever to me: they'd serve up a monthly or category archive, a couple hundred meg, maybe more, and an unrelated photograph, mostly because somewhere in those couple hundred meg are two words which the searcher put together but which I never did. If Google is restringing an algorithm to make this less likely, it's fine with me. Not that I have any desire to see Dennis' traffic diminish, mind you. (And mine hasn't dropped at all, for some inscrutable reason.)

I might also point out that if I really wanted to kill off my readership, I'd post shots of my head Photoshopped onto my own body.

The Oklahoman's Don Mecoy sees some unexpected fallout from the News Corp. acquisition of Dow Jones:

I'm holding out for "America's Most Shorted" or "Can You Invest Smarter Than a 5th-Grader?" myself.

Trini got her first shipment from Woot's T-shirt operation, and it's a pretty decent piece of work, executed in 100-percent cotton by the American Apparel guys.

One thing is troubling, though: the fabric-care tag contains the ominous notation "not for use as pants."

Who didn't see this coming?

Interest on $1000 for a year: $180.

Rewards on $1000 for a year: $10.

That smug feeling you get from your dubious environmentalism: priceless.

Neither Rand nor McNally will acknowledge such a thing. Just the same, those of you who followed World Tour '07 may remember that Kirk was plotting the route, day by day, on Google Maps.

It finally occurred to me to take a look at the finished product — I'd seen it in its formative stages — and while the link is a mouthful, the results are just fine. Thank you, sir, and remember: 2008 is not so far away.

I pulled up at the Gazette office this afternoon to snag a copy, and parked near the door was a shiny new(ish) Vespa with, heaven help us, bumper stickers. I admit I did crack a smile at "One Less SUV." (Across the street at Iron Starr I caught sight of a pink scooter, which temporarily disrupted a substantial number of brain cells for reasons I'd just as soon not go into.)

Of course, if you hang around alt-weeklies and other places with ostensible countercultural cred, you hardly need bumper stickers to determine the Zeitgeist. To demonstrate, Stewpid reads the minds of the Whole Foods shoppers, and comes up with stuff like this:

Being about as edgy as the Pillsbury Doughboy, I am in no position to grumble, but just the same, I don't think we're ever going to run out of hot horny hippie chicks. Not that any of them are likely to cross my threshold.

You ain't woman enough, says Faith Hill, to take my man's nutsack:

Take it easy, Faith. Sit a spell. Breathe.

(Via Hecklerspray.)

Woot is now shipping low-cost and/or low-mass items via SmartPost, a venture in which FedEx does the front-end work and then hands your parcel off to the Postal Service. How it's supposed to work, according to FedEx:

The T-shirt department is shipping everything SmartPost unless you ante up $5 for FedEx overnight. (If you don't, you pay zilch for shipping.) And you can be sure that not everyone is happy about this. From the Woot message board:

Because you're never going to be able to tell from looking at the logo. (Disclosure: I have had no issues with SmartPost, though the sample size — two — is not statistically significant.)

Alan Sullivan says he wouldn't be surprised to see more Twin Cities bridges crumbling:

We don't have this problem in Oklahoma: we simply cheap out on the actual construction.

Meanwhile, I picked up this bulletin from a MySpace friend:

No giggles here.

William C. Montgomery, at The Truth About Cars, on the single-minded nature of Nissan's Xtronic CVT:

In defense of Nissan, they have a pretty good (if costly) continuously-variable air-conditioning compressor that is almost imperceptible in normal driving.

Will there be an attempt to restore the old-and-busted Fairness Doctrine for broadcast media? Not if Air America's Thom Hartmann has anything to say about it:

There are a couple of things askew here — Apple, once upon a time, had a market share far greater than 4.8 percent, and 10 percent of the content does not necessarily equal 10 percent of the audience — but otherwise Hartmann's nailed it. New formats do not flourish overnight. But should they catch on in a few major markets, others will take notice. (Jack FM was on in Canada for a year and a half before any US station picked it up.)

And the competition? There is that panoply of right-wing commentators, but perhaps the biggest threat to commercial "progressive" broadcasting is good ol' National Public Radio, a reliably left-wing bunch, firmly entrenched, pretty much ubiquitous, and known to receive actual checks from some of us center-right types. It goes without saying, though, that there are people for whom NPR is insufficiently leftish.

I can see one other possible snag: old-time radio guys, a lot of whom are still around, hear the word "progressive" and think it's the old FM album-rock format from the 1970s. Ultimately it may be necessary to coin another term. What is not necessary, of course, is any sort of government action.

If you're not keen on giving out your credit-card numbers, you can probably relate to this:

And, of course, Apple wants to know how they're going to collect from you — even if they're giving you a freebie.

I used to advise people to get a card with a very low limit just for such occasions; yes, I know that you're not going to have to eat any illegal transactions, but there's a certain satisfaction in sticking it to identity thieves. At the time, I had a MasterCard with a whopping $100 limit, which I used for all manner of low-level Net transactions. Unfortunately, I was diligent in making payments, and now that card has a $12,500 limit, and I'd just as soon AverageOnlineMerchant dot com didn't have any record of it.

So I'm thinking maybe an American Express gift card, say $25 worth. (I get one of these every few months for spending some ungodly sum on my Amex.) It acts pretty much like any other American Express card, and once you get tired of it, it's easy to burn off somewhere.

The alternative — you get freebies without having to sign up for anything — is too remote a possibility to consider.

Norman Geras' normblog profile is one of the longer-running regular features in blogdom: over the years there have been more than 200 interviews, including most of the A-list bloggers, with occasional forays into the B-list.

We won't mention how far Norm had to dip into the alphabet to come up with me, but I was happy to participate just the same, and I thank him for the opportunity.

One of the AP pieces on the I-35W collapse in Minneapolis notes that on a scale of 1 to 100 for structural stability, the failed bridge scored a 50.

The Oklahoman reports that Oklahoma City's Crosstown Expressway rates a 49, though the state does not consider it unsafe. (The bridge was closed once, in 1989, after a crack in a support beam was discovered.)

I am very much a creature of habit: I didn't overthrow WordPerfect 5.1 until the last days of Ami Pro for Windows, which I persisted in using even after Lotus bought it, changed its name to WordPro and added almost Microsoftian layers of bloat to it. I am still trying to get the hang of OpenOffice.org, and at first I thought that my objections to it were rooted in its name: products, I aver, should not be named for their URLs.

But maybe it's merely Baby Duck Syndrome, which apparently affects heavy-duty code warriors like Jeff Atwood the same way it does us nonwizardly types:

This is probably not the time to admit to ten years' experience with Outlook Express.

(Via Wheels within Wheels.)

Yours truly, a bit over a week ago:

The Old Grouch helpfully pointed out in comments that these applied only to Virginians.

And apparently that particular bit of discrimination was enough to get the law enabling them struck down:

Source here. For now, this applies only to Henrico County. Still to be answered: how a government can pass off a fine as a mere fee.

(Courtesy of Bitter Bitch.)

Kevin Beck on Asperger's Syndrome:

And inevitably, there is a quick-and-dirty test online, consisting of 50 questions on a four-point scale (there is no Neutral). The cutoff point:

Well, isn't that special.

There is, of course, a limit to how seriously I'm going to take a mere 50-question inventory of this sort, but then I'm really smart and arrogant beyond measure.

(Via the kindly James Joyner.)

Regular readers will know that while the World Tours have a distinct air of spontaneity to them, made more so by my ongoing unwillingness to book rooms more than about 48 hours in advance, some of the behind-the-scenes details (financial arrangements, packing techniques, that sort of thing) are scienced out to the nth, or at least the eth, degree.

I have to admit, though, I never planned anything like this:

I've never had this dream, but I presumably lack imagination. (And I definitely lack possibilities.)

Still, if he can pull this off — well, if nothing else, the bloggage ought to be extraordinary.

If you attended schools in South Carolina about the time I did, you got some serious instruction on the Civil War Between the States for Southern Independence. One project assigned to two-person teams in our history class: produce a four-page newspaper for distribution in the city of Charleston for 13 April 1861 — the day after the mighty Southern cannons opened fire on Fort Sumter in Charleston Harbor. It was fun, and my partner and I did A-level work (actually, if you ask me, I think it was B-level work with A-plus-level graphic design: he was good at that sort of thing), but the time we spent concentrating on minutiae from the first day was time we wouldn't have to study the sweep, the flow, the dynamics of the war.

Which today, thanks to modern technology, you can do in four minutes and twenty-four seconds:

(Via Scribal Terror.)

There's no other way to explain "Rank: 1," unless Dave Sifry's trying out a new Rankness Index, an unlikely possibility at best. Still, I figured I ought to preserve this for posterity, since there's no way anyone's ever going to see this again unless I get much more proficient at Photoshop. At the time, the Top 100 button did seem to work correctly. (I'm guesstimating my actual Technorati rank to be around 23,000.)

Addendum, 9 pm: Robert Gorell of GrokDotCom sees a perfect opportunity to bait links.

Magazine publisher LPI Media is seeking to get rid of the stuff:

I hope there's some follow-up on how many subscribers actually do decide to forgo the extra plastic. And I wonder what it would take for Condé Nast to give up on it: just about everything I get from them is given the Laura Palmer treatment.

Last week I tried out the Homeland version of The Store Formerly Known As Albertson's, and I was not particularly impressed, so this week I ventured out to a location taken over by Williams, at 7001 NW 122nd.

This one was a little harder to judge: the floor plan is totally different, so much of my evaluation time was spent in the tedious business of finding stuff. (I never did find the taco-seasoning mix. At the old store, it was located near the pasta — the idea of putting it near the taco shells instead of 1.5 aisles away apparently doesn't fit into contemporary marketing strategy — but no such luck here.) And the aisles were seriously cluttered: evidently I'd hit them very early in the transition and they were busy restocking stuff.

One thing Williams had in common with Homeland: they weren't going to a lot of trouble to get rid of old Albertson's house-brand products. The 1.75-quart tub of A-brand ice cream, $3.99 in its original home, was $3.69 at one store, $3.79 at the other. As clearance sales go, this does not impress. The major difference between them, though, was that despite the fact that both these stores kept most of their personnel after the change, the Williams crew has a distinct good-ol'-boy (or -girl) flavor, the same one I'd seen in their now-defunct Mayfair Market. And unlike Mayfair, the new Williams store does not seem to stock unfrosted blueberry Pop-Tarts, which I reasoned would be shelved near the 62 other flavors.

I'm inclined to give these guys another shot in a week or so, to see if they're a bit more organized, but they've got one strike against them: NW 122nd and Rockwell is a heck of a long way to go for groceries.

After a week of no rain — something that hasn't happened since early March — I hauled out the sprinkler for the first time this year and gave the front yard an actual watering. And, as often happens with unusual events, there was some unusual fallout.

A band of youngsters, seven or eight of them, the youngest maybe nine years old, was walking up the street on this hot (high today was 95) afternoon while I was digging a few holes in the flower bed. They didn't see me, but they did see the sprinkler, and the absence of a sidewalk notwithstanding, they adjusted their path to make sure they got under at least one sweep.

As the last of them was getting a shower, I suddenly appeared from behind a shrub with a pair of hedge shears, the AK-47 of hand-operated gardening tools, and for one brief moment, there was palpable (if soggy) tension in the air as they waited for me to tell them to get off my damn lawn. I said nothing, and finally one of them yelled what could have been a "Thank you." It seemed reasonable to let it go at that.

Meanwhile, there was an audible screech from the big elm tree out front, and it didn't take long to determine its source: a bird who had taken up temporary sanctuary in the tree was apparently disturbed by these jets of water, perhaps because they were coming from the wrong direction. (Rain falls down, right?) With plenty of feather-ruffling, he darted from one set of branches to another, back and forth, shaking off the water and giving out with another screech about every third dart. This was, of course, impossible to photograph, since the bird was moving at high speed and water was slicing through the area almost as quickly, but I did manage to get off one halfway-decent shot, in which the irritation seems plainly visible on the bird's countenance: that beak, I'd bet, would be digging into my shoulder blades if he'd had his way. He continued to complain until I'd called off the deluge and reeled in the hose.

But for now, you've got to get the '08 Cadillac CTS:

It's not quite perfect yet, though:

I caught the gist of this in Car and Driver's CTS preview, couldn't quite believe it, and went hunting around for corroboration. Considering the littlest Caddy (if there were a BMW 4-series, it would be just about this size) is high on my want list, I have to hope that this goes over well.

Mythusmage sets a goal:

There are few things in life I appreciate more than clear-cut motivation.

Like the Mage, I am 53; unlike him, I have no expectation of lasting until 2045. (Tomorrow I expect to be read the medical equivalent of the Riot Act and put on a diet of gruel and igneous rocks. None of that sedimentary junk.) And I've never actually requested any donations. On the other hand, if you'd like to reimburse me for the five bucks I sent him, I won't even complain.

I was fiddling around with my MP3 Walkman, contemplating the possibility of avoiding Sony's cumbersome SonicStage interface, when I noticed that the folder on the machine which actually contains all the music files is called OMGAUDIO.

Lame (not to be confused with LAME) as it was, I giggled a bit, and then went looking to see if these letters were supposed to stand for something and/or if Sony had synthesized a backronym. No suggestions of such, but I did happen upon these guys, who have produced what appears to be some pretty nifty stuff — probably with no help from Sony.

"Stranger on the Shore," Mr. Acker Bilk's evocative clarinet piece that topped both British and American charts in 1962, has some truly-mournful qualities to it, but to one woman, it's the saddest song of all. It starts with a slumber party, and then:

I never went to any slumber parties, a perhaps-inevitable result of not having been born a girl, but I think I understand this. I have a similar reaction to Bert Kaempfert's "Wonderland by Night," which for me evokes a startlingly-exact mental picture. It's a Friday night, somewhere between ten and midnight, and a convertible is crossing the bridge into downtown; reflections of the streetlights play on the pavement, on the hood, on us. Her little black dress has a row of sequins, and as we pass under the lights, they glow ever so slightly, but it's nothing compared to the glow on her face as she smiles. "Now, you know we have to be back by...." She lets the sentence trail off.

"By when?" I ask.

She leans in slightly, faces me, crosses her legs. "Well, certainly before Thursday."

I was, of course, too young to imagine how this narrative might have continued. But it seemed so very real, and one day not so long ago I contrived to be crossing a bridge into a city at the moment this song came up on the stereo and I swear I could actually almost see her. (And if I've ever seen you in an LBD, trust me: it was you I almost saw.) I don't know what in Kaempfert's arrangement, or in Charly Tabor's trumpet solo, implanted these images, but they're strong enough to have persisted for more than forty years.

And yes, there is sadness:

I know what she means.

(Note: I've pulled the MP3s, on the basis that you've had enough time to hear them, and besides, my bandwidth bill is big enough already.)

The referrer log is a river, endlessly flowing, bringing the details of your visits; once in a while I stick in a pan, shake it a bit, and see if I can come up with some pure comic gold, or at least some risible pyrite.

is it illegal to be in your back yard naked in phoenix:  Not necessarily, but you'd better have SPF 6.0221415 × 10²³.

walmart how do they get away with paying such low wages:  Because you keep shopping there.

der wienerschnitzel vegan:  Cognitive dissonance boiled down to three words.

clever ways to deal with a steep driveway in the winter:  "Bribe your neighbor to shovel it off" seems like it might work.

girlfriend says penis taste weird:  Compared to what? Arugula? Zucchini?

big hooters:  The one on I-240 is 5,285 square feet.

ocelot spleen:  We never get requests for proper food.

how to get infinite minutes on a motorola V170 phone:  Plug the flux capacitor directly into the charging port.

INTJs don't date:  Not true. They just won't date you.

what does it mean when a transmission is rebuilt:  It means you get to write a very large check.

how do I undress the Feng twins:  Presumably one at a time.

car is an extension of men's penis:  If that were the case, you'd see bigger bumper guards.

Chinese President Hu Jintao is on an anti-corruption crusade, and one of the results of Hu's campaign is a deliciously-vicious online game:

Hey, it beats the hell out of screaming your head off at C-Span.

(Via Purple Avenger.)

Tulsa Mayor Kathy Taylor is apparently trying to drum up business for downtown eateries, reports meeciteewurkor. A staffer at St Simeon's Episcopal Home on the northside found this on the corkboard:

I don't find this particularly troubling, but I must note that (1) the residents might not be able to patronize those fine Downtown establishments and (2) St Simeon's is up at 37th and N. Cincinnati, a good three or four miles from any of them.

Two years ago there was a fair amount of buzz over a USB-based turntable from Ion, which plugs right into the PC and lets you rip that vinyl that's been cluttering up your room. Apparently it's sold well enough to justify a spin-off product: the TAPE2USB cassette deck, with actual switching for chromium-dioxide (Type II) and metal (Type IV) tape types.

Some form of the machine has apparently been floating around the rest of the world for some time now, but this is the first I'd heard of it. It won't be a must-buy for me, though, until they add in Dolby B noise reduction, which so far I haven't seen in Audacity and which Audacity developers say would be "tricky to get ... right without straight-up copying the actual process," something they'd like to avoid for the obvious reason. However, there is apparently a Winamp plugin with a built-in Dolby B workalike, so hope is not yet entirely dashed.

M-E-H.

I had responded to something mehworthy with "Meh" today, and it occurred to me that surely someone must have snapped up "meh" domains already. I cranked up the browser, and sure enough, meh.com, meh.net, meh.org, meh.biz and meh.info have squatters occupants. Five different occupants, yet, or so it appears. A couple of them greet you with a popup. (And what is it with these dot.info domains, anyway? With the singular exception of Eternity Road, every last one that shows up in my referrer logs is a spammer or worse.)

Incidentally, meh.tv redirects to Carson Daly, which proves there is justice in the world.

Any suggestions for who should get meh.gov?

(Found at Flibbertigibbet!)

According to the Daily Mail, the Labour government seeks to reduce solid waste by giving you less space to stash it:

Emalyse sees this piece as an effort by the newspaper to spread fear, uncertainty and doubt:

FUD is, of course, a time-(dis)honored method of boosting one's commercial profile; Microsoft's Bill Gates is an acknowledged master. Still, this whole "bin envy" concept strikes me as serious projection: as Dr Freud never said, sometimes a bin is just a bin.

Meanwhile, here in the Land of the Free and/or Reasonably Inexpensive:

I have two Big Blues, which hold about 240l each. In the last four years I think I've filled both in a single week twice; there have been several weeks when I didn't haul either of them out to the curb because they weren't sufficiently full to justify the effort. On the other hand, I'm not even considering calling the city and asking them to repossess one of them.

Well, not entirely new: she's still at the same URL and she's still running b2, but the new, improved, arguably less dissonant title is: Violins and Starships.

Tagline: "a little bit 18th century, a little bit 24th century..."

Which, you'll note, averages out to 21st.

I have no particular fondness for the United Auto Workers, though I will tell you up front that the last UAW-built car I bought — a Mazda 626, assembled in Flat Rock, Michigan with about two-thirds domestic parts — was the single most reliable vehicle I've ever driven: in 55,000 miles there were a total of three unscheduled repairs, and two of them (a wiper blade, to replace one bent by a vandal, and a windshield, to replace one cracked by a random rock) clearly weren't the fault of any aspect of the manufacturing process. (And the third, the adjustment knob on the driver's seat, could perhaps be attributed to the forces exerted on it by the driver's fat ass.) Pity they can't make these things deer-proof.

So I don't have a lot of sympathy for the notion that the current woes of the American auto industry are entirely the fault of the UAW and President Ron Gettelfinger and their roughly $25-an-hour price premium over the nonunion guys who work for Toyota and Hyundai and such. Yes, they're going to have to make some concessions during the current round of negotiations, but as Frank Williams writes in The Truth about Cars, "the crucial adjustments must come from management":

The UAW could work for free and it wouldn't make any difference, if what they're building is seen as More of the Same Old Crap. There are a few folks in Detroit boardrooms who understand this. How likely is it that these are the same folks having to negotiate with the union?

BatesLine quotes Ken Neal in the Sunday Tulsa World:

Neal uses that word "neglected." I do not believe it means what he thinks it means. Neither does Michael Bates:

Which fact should serve as an object lesson to Oklahoma City, where the urge to overregulate has never quite been entirely dampened. At least we're no longer being bowled over with wrecking balls. (If you're in the Core to Shore area, south of the old Crosstown, your mileage may — will — vary.)

It's at 300 SW 7th Street, and there's a rally Saturday at 11 10 am to try to save it.

From the release (background here):

This last paragraph may have been a misfire: rather a lot of people, including me and I'm one of them fercrissake, have no particular desire to cater to the Boomers, in aggregate a fairly-annoying lot. (Says Kim du Toit: "As an aging Boomer myself, nothing fills me with as much dread as watching my spoiled, petulant and self-absorbed generation getting older, and wailing about it.")

Still, if you're anxious to see some actual passenger rail in these parts before the next asteroid sweeps by, or even if you just think the New Crosstown is a boondoggle, come to the station at eleven ten Saturday. It will last, they say, about an hour.

Your major proponent: Tom Elmore, North American Transport Institute, 405.794.7163, or gtelmore at advancedtransport dot org.

Nobody nose but Gail, it seems.

News Item: Chrysler's new owner, Cerberus Capital Management, expects the carmaker to return to profitability in roughly three years' time. In a recent interview, Cerberus boss John Snow told reporters "I think you'll see that Chrysler will be in much better shape within three years. This is a plan to get it back to profitability." To ensure that it actually happens, former Home Depot chief Robert Nardelli has been appointed as the automaker's new Chairman and CEO.

Top Ten steps to be taken by new Chrysler chairman Bob Nardelli to bring the company back to prosperity:

10. Equip all Five Star dealerships with both English and Spanish signage
    
9. License the Hemi to John Deere to build the world's fastest lawn tractor
   
8. Redesign the Dodge Ram logo to look less girly
   
7. Fire whichever dorkwad thought the world needed a Jeep that seats seven
   
6. Outsource everything smaller than the Pacifica to Hyundai
   
5. Promise never to allow Lee Iacocca on television again
   
4. Same goes for Dr Z
   
3. Revive Dodge La Femme, offer Amanda Marcotte a test drive
   
2. Two words: Demon roadster
   
1. Create unprecedented buzz by burying all new models for fifty years
   

And don't you miss rich Corinthian leather?

To commemorate the sixth anniversary of Instapundit, Glenn Reynolds has pointed us to some of his first week's work.

Interestingly, the shortest post in that group is three lines long, about the length of his longer posts these days. What can we learn from this? (I blame the news cycle.)

The very beginning of Oklahoma City's Bulky Waste rules:

Why would they be looking at my junk in the first place?

Anyway, if this didn't prove persuasive enough, you'll find this across the bottom of your next utility bill:

Of course, if it's really great bulky, it won't stay out there for anywhere near 72 hours.

Well, isn't this sweet:

Proceeds from the sale of this tag will go to reducing Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to his component atoms support the 45th Infantry Museum.

(Via Princess Sparkle Pony.)

56, 72, 24, 36, 66, 52.

Not a lottery pick, but page numbers in the Table of Contents in a widely-circulated magazine.

Surely there must be some reason for this other than sheer perversity.

On the subject of Barry Bonds' 756th, from the man who first hit 755:

I like that.

(Seen at Outside the Beltway.)

"When you're born in Mannford, Oklahoma," Lee Hazlewood once sang, "there ain't no up in your cup; there's just down."

Hazlewood, who was diagnosed with terminal kidney cancer a couple of years ago, died Saturday in Las Vegas at 78. Inevitably folks will mention his work with Nancy Sinatra in the 1960s, which produced some remarkable singles, most amazing of which was their duet on "Some Velvet Morning," among the least explainable records of the decade. But his solo work is legendary, and to borrow a line from WFMU's Brian Turner, "Few can say they've had their songs performed by both Dean Martin ('Houston') and Einsturzende Neubauten ('Sand')."

Barton Lee Hazlewood was indeed born in Mannford, Oklahoma, in 1929; he studied medicine at SMU, served in the Army during the Korean war, and surfaced in the middle 1950s as a DJ and songwriter, scoring big with Sanford Clark's version of "The Fool" in 1956. He made solo records in the Sixties, produced by Jimmy Bowen and Billy Strange, and it was likely the Bowen connection through Reprise Records that brought Hazlewood and Nancy Sinatra together. (Bowen would later produce Frank Sinatra's "That's Life.") Hazlewood reshaped her voice, pushing her into a lower register, and provided lots of songs, including the infamous "These Boots Are Made for Walkin'," which stomped its way to Number One in a hurry; the story goes that Hazlewood actually thought "Boots" was more suitable for a male singer, but gave it to her anyway.

To give the man a proper sendoff, here [was] "My Autumn's Done Come," a song from The Very Special World of Lee Hazlewood (1966) which might be better known in its 2003 remake by Hooverphonic.

(Note: MP3s expire after a time.)

The following conversation took place early this morning in 42nd and Treadmill's cavernous (watch for stalactites) break room:

"There's cake, if you want any."

"Who's the unlucky person?"

"Me."

As she walks away, she adds, "Forty-three." And as she's walking away, I'm trying to remember if she looked any different when she was twenty-six.

Not much, I conclude.

It's called Gunt, and allegedly it's a firearm for women, in three flavors: the hot-pink Classic Gunt revolver, the Charlotte Bronson semi-automatic, and the Golden Bassey. Posted prices in the UK range from £75 to twice that.

"Is this for real?" asks Dollymix:

These guns aren't even available for men in the UK, according to the polite fictions imposed by the 1997 firearms bill that outlawed ownership of handguns altogether.

There is some doubt that the Gunt even exists, except as a viral. I have to concur: for one thing, I don't know any women who would be impressed by 9 millimeters. Besides, all that shiny stuff is counterproductive.

Actual case filed in the Southern District of Texas, which requires no explanation:

Note to Mr Cheatypants: Next time, you might try a different florist — and pay cash.

(Via Consumerist.)

Not this time:

Didn't Johnny Carson warn us about marmosets on our heads?

(Via Majikthise.)

The new GM900 platform (Tahoe, Suburban, Denali, et al.) has gotten decent reviews, though sales are running a bit below expectations, perhaps due to the combination of a queasy stock market and ghastly gas prices. But whatever the problem, you can't blame it on ignoring the needs of female drivers:

You might think this was kind of a drag, but there was a reason for it:

And the production models reflected those experiences:

Chief engineer Mark Cieslak, one of the, um, testers, notes:

I draw the following conclusions:

• This strikes me as a heck of a lot more scientific than listening to the yammering of focus groups;
  
• General Motors (in fact, Detroit generally) could definitely use some more female engineers;
  
• It's about time to revive the Trans Am.
  

(Seen at Autoblog.)

Keep in mind that this definition of "today" is a bit more flexible than, say, "the period since 12 midnight."

• The quality of bagels diminishes as you get farther from New York City.

• Why do people take out such unfavorable mortgages? They're wired for it.

• Improve your carbon footprint: drive faster.

• Behold the dream-enhancing power of cheese.

• If you blow 0.15 on a breathalyzer, you should demand the device's source code.

• Matthew McConaughey is happy to see you.

• Trident gum: approved by dentists specialists in abdominal surgery.

• The opposition to sending text messages while driving includes rather a lot of people who send text messages while driving.

• Who knew? Canned piano.

• You do not want to relocate car seats to a different car.

• There are evidently fewer Segway fans than I thought.

• Forget the implants. Have a cookie.
  

The future: lies ahead.

Britain's National Health Service has about a two-year waiting list for sexual-reassignment surgery, leading one person to take matters into his own hands:

And how did it feel?

Of course, the real pain is yet to come: when they cut his salary by thirty percent.

(Via Interested-Participant.)

I mentioned this already, but now there's a posted agenda:

And an addition:

Note: I had previously reported the start time as 11 am. The correct start time is 10 am.

And here's a whole shelf full of them, from the Physicians' Derb Reference, compiled by John Derbyshire.

Sample:

Positioned elsewhere:

See your politicial-science provider to determine if these or similar preparations are right for you. Follow label directions explicitly. If adverse reactions occur, discontinue use and seek political advice.

(Spotted at the BatesLine linkblog.)

What's funny about this is not so much the satire, which is warmed-over Landover Baptist, but the fact that they're using the "Contempt" WordPress theme.

Michael Weiss, from Slate's "Culturebox," on the dodgy subject of what to name one's blog:

I have a better chance of getting to see Mary Katherine Ham's underwear drawer than I do of getting a call from CNN. Still, this could work: "Call Mr Plough, that's my name / That name again is Mr Plough."

(Low-level rant: I named this place after a piece of unreal estate, only to find that some people assume it's a personal pseudonym — which would be at the very least wholly unnecessary, since my name's been on the front page since Day One.)

And I did smile at this:

I'll run it past the Department of Redundancy Department.

(Via Tinkerty Tonk, which is a pretty decent name even if you're not a Wodehouse fan, in which case what's wrong with you?)

More than once I've bought a book which turned out to be a book I'd already bought, and I hated to give it away, so — well, you get the idea.

Still, sometimes there's a good reason for owning two copies of a book:

"Alberts" being The Molecular Biology of the Cell, by Bruce Alberts et al. It's indeed a bruiser, with a triple-digit price.

On the other hand, if there is anything new coming out in 18th-century British literature, I'd like to know about it. Even if there's no mention of mitochondria at all.

(I think I once had two copies — different vintages — of The Handbook of Chemistry and Physics, another massive tome that's subject to change.)

Lileks remembers this day in 1900 (by proxy):

Of course, these numbers can be deceptive. In 1988, I was in the process of relocating to Los Angeles when I heard a filler piece about average traffic on L.A. freeways moving at something like 32.5 mph. When I actually got there, it was obvious what they really meant: half the time traffic was moving along at 65, and half the time it wasn't moving at all.

This is, in fact, a slogan of Virginia's Independent Green Party, but it played well in downtown Oklahoma City this morning, as about a hundred rail buffs, progressive activists, and old-fashioned penny-pinchers — the latter group includes me — gathered in front of Union Station to "Save the Rails."

And it's probably a good thing that they specified "Rails," because the station itself is in no danger. Heck, it's on the National Register of Historic Places, and has been for nearly thirty years. But the New Crosstown Expressway, currently advancing beyond the drawing-board stages, was cunningly (I suspect) designed to rip out the railyard behind the station, turning it from a viable transport hub into a stately but static relic.

While it's not surprising that the left would pick up on this issue — most of the support for public transportation comes from that side of the aisle — there's a fiscal-conservative angle as well, and it comes at you from two directions:

• Estimates of the cost of the New Crosstown continue to rise. Right now, it's running around half a billion dollars. Repairing and upgrading the existing road wouldn't be inexpensive, and I suspect the $50-million figure suggested is a tad low, but even if it's twice that much it would still save $400 million. (Reminder: all the original MAPS projects combined cost less than $400 million.)

• When Mayor Cornett put out a call for suggestions for a possible MAPS 3, the single most requested project, by more than three to one, was improved transit, so it's not at all inconceivable that the city would actually put a commuter-rail system into the MAPS 3 package as early as next year. And it makes no sense to trash a railyard that already has all the necessary connections in place, only to replicate it somewhere else at greater expense.
  

I talked with J. M. Branum after the speechifying, and we took a walk to the back of the station where the passenger facilities are. They've been left to deteriorate, of course, but they're not beyond repair, and the rail lines themselves need only a freshening here and there.

And we had one actual Presidential candidate on hand: Gail Parker, who hails these days from those Independent Greens in Virginia but who spent some of her childhood here in the Sooner State, and who was well received by the crowd. (She also schlepped along a Draft Bloomberg sign, which if nothing else indicates that she's keeping the options open.) I was hoping to hear Rep. Andrew Rice, who's working up a Senate campaign against Jim Inhofe next year, but he was stuck in traffic or something. The local NBC and Fox affiliates sent cameras to cover the event; so far as I know, only Branum and I represented local blogdom, and I'm pretty sure no one expected me. Certainly Tom Elmore didn't.

As these things go, this one went pretty well; there may be more rallies in months to come as the price tag on the Crosstown continues to rise and some of its boosters start feeling the heat.

Was there ever a corps of Professional Street Namers? Because boy, do we need them now:

The one thing you can be sure of is that King Street is not named for Dr Martin Luther King, Jr.

And dare I mention that Bismarck, North Dakota has a Boulevard Avenue?

McGehee says Technorati is ignoring him, and offers a collection of random tags to get their attention, starting with "ron paul" and ending in "you tube."

Drawing on my vast (or half-vast, anyway) experience in dealing with Technorati, I suggest he add a "david sifry" tag. They'll be along in less than 24 hours.

The Save the Rails rally yesterday dealt specifically with the preservation of the Union Station railyard and the potential reinstatement of the old Interurban rail lines. This is not, however, the only passenger-rail issue facing the state, and at the rally there was a representative of the Northern Flyer Alliance, a group which seeks the expansion of Amtrak's existing Heartland Flyer, which currently runs between Oklahoma City and Fort Worth, into northern Oklahoma and eastern Kansas.

In late July, the Alliance organized a meeting in Wichita with various Kansas officials and an Amtrak representative, making the pitch that the existing Flyer was worth $3.8 million a year in economic development in Oklahoma and Texas. Nothing in transportation happens overnight, and Amtrak apparently is not permitted to undertake expansion studies using federal funds, so Kansas and Oklahoma (and maybe Texas) would have to put up the dollars for a route study.

NFA's proposed route would extend the Heartland Flyer northward more or less parallel to US 77, connecting to the Southwest Chief at Newton, Kansas, and then northeastward to Kansas City. The Chief, which connects Chicago and Los Angeles, already runs between Newton and Kansas City, but in the wee hours of the morning.

Unspoken in any of this is the actual cost, and there's an addtional problem: BNSF freight services are quite busy along the existing track, meaning windows of opportunity to run a passenger train will be limited. And if there's an elephant in the room, it's Amtrak's always-tenuous financial condition. I don't consider any of these to be entirely insurmountable, though it's going to take a lot of work to pull this off.

And if you thought this should have been called "The train to Kansas City," you're obviously not a Shangri-Las fan.

It's no particular secret that the main reason a firm installs a voice-response system is to reduce the number of incoming phone calls. I've suggested that we try this at 42nd and Treadmill, preferably in some language which none of our customers comprehend, such as, oh, English.

Of course, if you really, truly need to talk to the company, which does occasionally happen, this particular gatekeeper is more hellish than helpful:

The solution is elegantly simple:

And if your favorite song happens to be by, say, Nine Inch Nails, you'll be in the proper frame of mind for engaging with the customer-service representative.

"I'll take Renaissance Men for a thousand, Alex."

Okay, maybe if you run down the usual list of Renaissance Men, you probably won't run into Merv Griffin. But Merv, who died this week at 82, had as diverse a life as exists in a Beverly Hills ZIP code, and probably more fun than most of his contemporaries.

Really. In a career that spanned more than half a century, Merv Griffin wore the following hats:

• Singer
  
• Actor
  
• Talk-show host
  
• Game-show host
  
• Game-show creator/developer (Jeopardy! and Wheel of Fortune)
  
• Real-estate developer
  
• Thorn in the side of Donald Trump
  

See? Fun. What's more, he was named "Merv," a name with verve, even if it had been shortened from "Mervyn." You just had to like this guy.

(Via Lorie Byrd, who did.)

News Item: Oklahoma bridges are in the spotlight again, but the state's Transportation Department has a plan to fix or replace nearly 800 of them in the next eight years if revenue comes in as projected.

An ambitious schedule, perhaps, but not one that will impress the Canadians, who managed to replace a bridge in seventeen hours:

Of course, this doesn't include the time for construction of the individual modules, but it's still pretty impressive, and these pictures from Diana are just this side of inspirational.

And the punchline: the completion in seventeen hours was two hours late.

Yet here it is. Compare and contrast with this: "The High Priestess represents wisdom, or an interest in knowledge, intuition and education. She is the feminine consciousness — the virgin goddess, the moon daughter. She challenges you to find what is hidden below the surface of a situation and remember the possibilities you hold inside. It signifies a time to uncover secrets in life because something in the unconscious is waiting to come out. Be guided by intuition and inspiration. She is a bridge to higher plane. Passive and receptive, she guards the gate of the unconscious and connects you to dreams, psychic powers, lunar cycles, and female mysteries. She is a subtle but powerful connection with the collective unconscious or world soul. Sometimes the High Priestess represents an enlightened and chaste woman. She can also represent a mysterious woman, a femme fatale, sexual and charismatic without emotional involvement. She also represents feminine principles and grace. She also can be a signal for the need for solitude, seclusion and meditation as well as wisdom and education." Maybe we should just turn it upside down.

In case you just wandered in here from Lower Slobbovia — we're higher, though not tremendously so — once a week I shake out the contents of the referrer logs and assemble a compilation of search strings chosen for their sheer weirdness. The figure above in parentheses indicates that I've done this a few times before.

it ain't gonna suck itself:  Too bad. I'd love to see that on video.

"second life" male bushy pubic hair:  Because it's so hard to grow in real life.

steven tyler airbrushed paintings:  Didn't help. Still looks like Steven Tyler.

naked montanans:  You just want to see somebody's Butte.

erotic chrome female robots:  That will be $2000 extra.

jello in loincloth:  No wonder Tarzan looks so glum these days.

men invented pantyhose make them wear it:  I don't think this is quite the sort of precedent you want to establish.

nudism in greenland:  See? There's an upside to global warming.

worm poop x-games:  Now that's "extreme."

naked women in new jersey married looking to get laid:  So far as I know, there are no naked women in New Jersey.

john edwards 5000 square foot home:  Home? That's the garage.

nude sunbath fence next door peek:  You do and I'll poke your eye out.

treating coprophagia with flintstones vitamins:  "Here, honey, try some of these. They taste like crap."

News item: Karl Rove, the political adviser who masterminded President George W. Bush's two winning presidential campaigns, is resigning, the White House confirmed Monday. In an interview published this morning in The Wall Street Journal, Rove said, "I just think it's time."

Top Ten items on Karl Rove's agenda once he leaves the White House:

10. Walk past Patrick Fitzgerald's house, whistle
    
9. Redesign secret weather machine to produce pure carbon dioxide, then place it in stationary orbit over Al Gore
   
8. Sign on to Emperor Palpatine's campaign
   
7. Buy more Halliburton stock
   
6. Join General Motors, become TV spokesman for Hummer
   
5. Start fast-food chain to be called "Karl's Sr."
   
4. Stop sending checks to right-wing bloggers
   
3. Call up Harry Reid every half-hour, ask "Is your refrigerator running?"
   
2. Cancel date with Maureen Dowd
   
1. Mastermind George W. Bush's campaign for President of Mexico in 2012
   

Busy man.

The Urban Land Institute has a nice little booklet (available here in PDF format) called "The Advantages of Multi-Family Housing."

They do not, of course, address the disadvantages:

Which is why no one lives on my urban land but me, dammit.

There must be some explanation for this question:

I don't think of myself as particularly creative, but I'm pretty sure I could dispose of the stuff in a non-wasteful manner.

As for the religious stereotype in the title, well, we have a saying down here: if you can find four Baptists together, you can usually find a fifth.

(Via Spitbull.)

Ramón Salazar's 20 Centimeters, just to balance all its plot complications, assumes the frenetic pace of those people spinning plates on the tops of poles on the Ed Sullivan Show to the accompaniment of the Sabre Dance from Khachaturian's Gayane. Certainly Salazar has loaded plenty on his plate: Marieta (Mónica Cervera) is a hooker and a pre-op M2F transsexual and a narcoleptic. What's more, every time she nods off she has fantasies somewhere on the continuum between high-budget music videos and low-budget Hollywood musicals, and, oh, did I mention she lives with a dwarf who wants to learn the cello? You'd expect this to have a high WTF quotient, and of course it does, but it's just insane enough to work.

Not as angry as Hedwig and the Angry Inch and a lot more European than Transamerica, 20 Centimeters fits into no particular niche: it's a romantic comedy, maybe, but it's also rather gritty in a dreamlike sort of way, as though Scorsese had been working for the old Arthur Freed unit at MGM, and there's far more in the way of punchlines than I expected. The musical numbers are somewhere between wacky and wondrous, and my old rule of thumb — really drippy love songs work better in Spanish than in English — is seriously put to the test, especially when one Spanish-language number drifts imperceptibly into "I Only Want to Be With You." The only real misfire is the finale, which is set up beautifully but which is choreographed to too earnest a version of Queen's "I Want to Break Free," and while Cervera is game, she succeeds mostly in reminding us how much we miss Freddie Mercury.

The title? Well, Marieta is every inch a woman, except for, um, eight inches. (Do the math.) As a motion-picture epic, it ranks somewhere below, say, Fellini's 8½; as the answer to the question "What would you get if Pedro Almodóvar decided to remake Grease?" it's very good indeed.

(Disclosure: Reviewed from DVD purchased by me.)

The primary election for Oklahoma County District 1 Commissioner is today. Five Democrats and two Republicans go in; one of each comes out. (There will be no runoff: the highest number of votes gets the nod.)

Also: Del City is looking to renew a 1.5-cent sales tax for five years; in Yukon. voters will be asked to approve a modification to a bond program; Forest Park is holding a franchise election for OG&E se