Listed chronologically:

"Hoosier daddy?" (6 January)
"Dead man hawking" (16 January)
"May I have this Dansk?" (17 January)
"Just a Falcon minute" (6 February)
"Dugong show" (25 February)
"When the levy brakes" (17 March)
"Downholstery" (1 April)
"Nothing could be finer than the feeling of angina" (21 April)
"Philately will get you nowhere" (1 May)
"Bjørn under a bad sign" (6 May)
"The pained, it's plain, look vainly at the mains" (2 June)
"Hot funds in the summertime" (19 June)
"La belle dame sans culottes" (19 July)
"Jeep thrills" (29 July)
"Something Wiki this way comes" (17 August)
"Icahn has cheezburger?" (16 September)
"Tanks for the maladies" (22 October)
"N2 the mystic" (31 October)
"Got the Mercedes bends" (4 November)
"Living in debasement" (6 November)
"And just ice for all" (9 December)

(Total number of 2007 posts: 2,021. Some marginally-acceptable turns of phrase are recounted here.)

We're going on a diet, says Mayor Cornett.

Well, let's see: one million pounds divided by 540,000 people equals one pound, thirteen and a half ounces per person. I ought to be able to manage my share.

Prius, the name given to Toyota's first hybrid vehicle, is supposed to be derived from Latin. Jan Freeman of The Boston Globe quoted a Toyota spokesperson as follows:

Well, no:

And if there's one thing Toyota does well, it's neuter.

Now what's the plural form? Priuses just doesn't have that classical zing. At long last, the question is answered, once and for all:

I expect Dr. Weevil may have something to say about that, in which case I'll ask him about Lexuses. ("Lexi"?)

(Inspired, if that's the word, by The Truth About Cars.)

People who bought Random Crap Calendars from Woot — this would include me — have received the following notification:

And how does this work?

"Besides, one does get tired of aging flight attendants with their clothes off," he lied, possibly under the influence of a Motivational Zen Fairy.

I suppose I should be surprised by this:

Three points, if points they be:

• The call girl-turned-author in George Axelrod's novel Where Am I Now — When I Need Me? at one point turned out an essay in which "ointment" is revealed to be the dirtiest word of them all. I have no idea whether this was related to Axelrod's theory of the seven-year itch.

• In my admittedly-limited experience, the most effective treatment for low female libido is to stop dating me. (Disclosure: Sample size is too small to be considered statistically significant.)

• What happens if some Viagra-enhanced fellow (think Hugh M. Hefner) has an encounter with, say, a twenty-year-old blonde with a couple extra tubes of LibiGel? Will the results be measurable on the Richter scale? And in which state will the survivors be buried?
  

(Via Protein Wisdom.)

Update, 6:45 pm: The Fark thread on this subject notes: "Still no cure for flannel nightwear."

The last time I did this, I didn't do so well, and I have no reason to think my crystal ball is any less murky after two years in the closet, but what the hell. That last time, I confined myself to things which seemed at least somewhat probable. This time around, not so much. And if these things don't happen, you didn't hear about them from me.

• The Bush administration will get one last crack at the Supreme Court, and will botch the nomination.

• The Cuban embargo will be ended, whether or not Fidel Castro survives the year.

• Senator Clinton will remain Senator Clinton.

• The Republicans will lose five Senate seats and seven House seats.

• Condoleezza Rice will resign as Secretary of State by midyear.

• The Supreme Court will rule that yes, you do have the right to bear arms, even in the District of Columbia.

• The weather nationwide will be largely uneventful, which will be blamed on global warming.

• In Oklahoma, the Democrats will gain one Senate seat and break the 24-24 deadlock, though the House will remain in the hands of the GOP.

• In the hope of turning out Jim Inhofe, state Democrats will launch a "Draft Brad Henry" campaign. The Guv, smiling, will decline.

• New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg will launch his independent Presidential bid with a Super Bowl ad.

• The SuperSonics will open the 2008-09 season in Seattle's KeyArena.

• Katie Couric will ask to be let out of her CBS contract after the November elections.

• KFOR-TV in Oklahoma City will begin phasing out all its 4-related imaging.

• Another delay will be announced in the Crosstown Expressway project, and the projected cost will rise to $1.2 billion.

• The announcement will come less than one week before the city holds a sales-tax election to finance improvements to the Ford Center.

• Kansas and Oklahoma will discuss making their automated toll-road systems compatible with one another, but will reach no agreement.

• A group of interrelated spam blogs will be blocked by Technorati and frozen out of Google AdSense, and the spammer will sue, citing the First Amendment and charging restraint of trade.

• N. Z. Bear, pressed for time, will offer to sell the TTLB Ecosystem.
  

Conversely, if by some fluke I called more than one of these right — well, we'll worry about that later.

Gawker Media's Valleywag blog has gone public with a memo from Gawker management — specifically, from Noah Robischon, who presumably sitteth at the right hand of Nick — announcing a new pay plan for the blog staff. Some of its points, I think, are worth noting by those of us who don't get paid by the pageview:

"Don't knock sheer brute quantity," said some character who put up over two thousand posts in each of two consecutive years.

I daresay, three, maybe even four percent of my stuff thus qualifies.

To be fair, I can see Robischon's point, and it's been all too visible throughout the Denton Empire, which at times has come off as a, perhaps the, leading vendor of snark qua snark. (Major exceptions: Lifehacker, because it's firmly anchored in reality, and Fleshbot, because it's firmly anchored, um, somewhere else.) So paying these folks a flat monthly rate plus bonuses for pageviews, as the new plan ordains, actually makes a certain amount of sense.

Although there's this, from a commenter:

But it was always thus: there exists no system that cannot in some way be gamed.

I just hope they're not relying solely on Sitemeter numbers to pay these folks.

One of those stories almost too good to be true, as recounted in Wikipedia:

I picked up Electric Landlady when it came out; it was not much of a hit — neither "Walking Down Madison" nor "My Affair," released as singles, charted in the States — but it spent a lot of time in my CD player, and still gets the occasional spin. Would I have bought it were it not for the Hendrix twist? I'm not really sure; I knew who she was, and I was familiar with Tracey Ullman's remakes of MacColl songs, but the title probably sealed the deal.

On the other hand, Kathy Shaidle would have sold me a copy of her e-book even if it hadn't been titled Acoustic Ladyland: Kathy Shaidle Unplugged. It's always fun watching the words go by when she's on a tear, and these "B-sides and rarities," as she describes them, were new to me; I wasn't reading the Toronto Star back then, and God knows I don't have any reason to read it now. She'll set you up with a sample chapter, even. The motivations here are clear:

Now I'll have to hunt down a copy of God Rides a Yamaha, a title worthy of a Highway Chile.

There's something a tad askew when somebody writes to Dear Abby with a tale like this:

Sounds like something's missing from the narrative, right? Right:

You have to wonder how she defines "in her presence": although she says that she and the lad's family are "good friends" elsewhere in her letter, at no point does she mention any actual encounter other than watching him from a distance. Abby herself confounds the issue:

I have to admit, my sympathies are with the kid, if only because (1) this is a fairly typical wardrobe for me and (2) I was coming up on sixteen when it occurred to me that pajamas were superfluous at best. (I am still so persuaded, despite the fact that it got down to about 20 degrees — call it -7 Celsius — last night.) I do a better job of keeping the shades in position, though.

Apparently the fact that CompUSA is liquidating has not motivated them to mend their ways on their deathbed. Witness the following:

Heck, they could double the price, then mark it off 40 percent, and make it look even better.

Then again, these are the folks who once tried to sell me a service contract on an SD card.

I truly hope this turns out to be fiction:

On the upside, it certainly speaks well of OnStar's remote diagnostics.

The City Manager's report on ice-storm response is out, and the price tag looks pretty stiff: 6649 hours of overtime by city crews and 2588 tons of salt spread.

On the question of debris removal, the two lowest bidders (around $70 a ton) have been put to work gathering up what's stacked at curbside. The city has been divided into thirty-four sectors for this purpose, and so far nine, all in the middle of town, have been assigned. How this is supposed to work:

So if you didn't get everything to the curb by the time the truck comes through, you've got at least 14 days to finish up.

No one seems to be speculating as to how long it will take to clean up all the debris, though I've got my money on the third of March.

The Oklahoman ran a partial list of Oklahoma-related earmarks in that huge federal-spending bill, and as pork goes, we seem to have gotten mostly rinds. This is the one, though, that really gets me:

Half a million bucks for a project that's going to cost over a billion? What is this, National See If Tom Coburn Is Sleeping Day? Five hundred Gs wouldn't build one good onramp — not that we have any real experience in this state when it comes to building good onramps.

CFI Care [not its real name], our insurance plan at 42nd and Treadmill, has been taken over by a new group of weasels, duly replacing the old group of weasels, and I am not exactly delighted to report that I will be expected to shell out a $60 copay for a drug that costs at retail — wait for it — $65.33.

Which makes me wonder how much the premiums would be if someone had had the temerity to say "Screw the drug plan, just cover the expensive stuff."

Four years from now, assuming I haven't been nickel-and-dimed to death, the drug goes off patent; an application to produce a generic formulation is already in hand at the FDA.

So what did I do to deserve spam in German?

There's a lot more, and it all links back to myigla.net, owned by S-H-F E-Marketing, in a place called Shimshit, Israel. Feel free to write your own jokes; I'm sure Mr. Half A Man there won't mind.

All that's left of the Cincinnati Post and its across-the-river sister Kentucky Post is this: kypost.com, billed as "life in the 859."

The Posts were put out to the online pasture after the Joint Operating Agreement under which the Post and the rival Enquirer expired at the end of 2007. It wasn't a surprise — Enquirer owner Gannett had advised that the JOA would not be renewed way back in 2004 — but fans of actual paper held out hope that Scripps could keep the Post going. (And Scripps is the weak sister in three other JOAs: in Birmingham, Albuquerque and Denver.)

Consultant Peter Krasilovsky assesses the prospects:

I took a look at the offerings, and while the overall package is reasonably attractive, I wonder why there's no RSS feed.

I've said it before, and I'll say it again: weight is the enemy of fuel economy.

Nissan, which has no particular reason to agree with me, has apparently come to the same conclusion: the Home of the Hamburger vows to slice vehicle weight across its entire fleet. By 2015, the company says, Nissan vehicles will average 15 percent lighter than their 2005 counterparts.

Were I cynical, I could suggest that they could pull this off simply by dropping the Brobdingnagian-sized Titan truck and its SUV spinoffs: the Infiniti QX56 in its two-wheel-drive form (add another 300 lb for 4WD) presses down upon the earth to the tune of 5700 lb, a heavy piece indeed. But if they can scrape a few pounds out of the actual passenger cars, so much the better; my current ride (a Nissan product) weighs about 13 percent more than the one it replaced (which wasn't), and I can feel the bulk on every tight curve, to say nothing of every visit to the gas station.

This week Andrew Ian Dodge has thoughtfully prepared a Caucus Edition of Carnival of the Vanities. As before, it's text, no video, so no MPEG-4 compression using the H.264 standard.

Mark Kleiman takes two factoids about the Great White North, and finds a worthy conclusion:

Which works out to better than 5.7 l/100 km.

The last vestige of the Soviet empire: a bust of Lenin in the remote Antarctic.

Easy to explain, actually:

With an eye toward the future, the Soviets built this weather-resistant icon out of — space-age plastic.

By two guys who were half in the bag, so at least the bag's full, right?

And now, off to the primaries, where New Hampshire will be taken for Granite.

Up to now I'd been fairly impressed with GM's Chevrolet Malibu advertising, but the new print ad (with the obligatory green background) for the Malibu Hybrid is a serious misstep — to anyone who ever took a physics course, anyway.

Here's the goofy bit:

This sounds impressive until you do the math: 10 kilowatts equals 13.4 horsepower. As hybrids go, this is pretty darn mild.

The pitch for these Chloe sandals at Intermix calls them "bondagesque," presumably a reference to the humongous buckles across the back. I dunno. And I'm still wondering why there's a two-tone heel — and why these two tones? I'd like to think these would look good on someone, but they seem awfully clunky to me, and at $645 that's a couple of bucks each and every time you clunk.

(Via Shoewawa, which is looking for people to coordinate with these shoes.)

By most standards, Aubrey McClendon's Chesapeake Energy expansion has been more boon than blight, but I have to wonder: where will it end? Wilshire Boulevard? The Broadway Extension? Penn Square? Saugatuck, Michigan?

Last summer, the Saugatuck Dunes Coastal Alliance wrote McClendon and asked him to reconsider his plans, even offering to buy him out. No sale.

The township board is now waiting for McClendon to lay out his development plan in detail; it's expected by June.

(Via Seattlest.)

An Alaskan legislator has prefiled a bill to move the state capital from Juneau to Anchorage. Rep. Kevin Meyer (R-Anchorage, what a shock) says that contact with the legislature is difficult for most Alaskans because there are no roads to Juneau — you can only reach the city by air or by boat — and that that the expense of traveling to the capital is considerable.

Oddly, neither Ted Stevens nor Don Young offered to build a bridge.

I recognize, though, that isolation of a legislature has its consequences, and therefore I suggest that someone introduce a bill to move the Oklahoma capital to Guymon. Or even Juneau, if there's room.

If your ZIP code is anywhere between 90001 and 96199, you might consider stocking up on HVAC thermostats right away before Big Brother gets his fat fingers on the controls.

Come to think of it, given the tendency for dumb California ideas to spread elsewhere, we might all be wise to snag a couple of the old Honeywell rounds while we still can.

(Via Darleen Click.)

Oklahoma is planning to redesign the standard state license plate again, and the Oklahoman is running a poll featuring six of the preliminary designs. Of the versions shown in the poll, I lean toward #1, which has an asymmetrical design — something we've never had before — and a decent rendering of Allan Houser's "Sacred Rain Arrow" sculpture.

Still, given the current emphasis on our collective chunkiness as a people, I'm thinking that a more accurate plate might look something like this:

After all, Will Rogers never met a cherry limeade he didn't like.

Addendum: There's a discussion at the TulsaNow forum.

Steph Mineart offers a radical redesign of the election cycle which addresses both efficiency and voter fatigue:

Apart from her rather cavalier dismissal of the smaller states, this makes sense to me. If nothing else, it would call a halt to ever-earlier primaries. (The New Hampshire primary in 1968 was on the second Tuesday of March, fercrissake.) Iowans will probably object, but I suspect that apart from the inevitable activist types, Hawkeyes might be faintly embarrassed by that whole caucus thing and the attention it gets.

A radio horror story that somehow made me smile:

(Note: Bonneville and Schulke/SRP were major syndicators of "beautiful-music" formats, which have largely fallen by the wayside these days.)

Or at least more entertaining. I spent a good forty-five minutes assembling a ballot for the 2008 Bloggies, and I think I did a reasonable job of it, all things considered.

How it works:

Finalists will be announced on the 22nd; the winners will be announced in March.

And no, I did not vote for myself: there was no category for Least Improved.

Update: An otherwise-rational man has nominated me for the Lifetime Achievement Award. Doesn't this require me to, like, achieve something?

Sure you do. In fact, there's probably still storm debris stacked by the curb. (I did see a truck actually picking up the stuff along NW 50th east of Independence yesterday.)

This being Oklahoma, though, you shouldn't be surprised to hear that yesterday Oklahoma City basked in the warmest 5th of January on record — local records go back to 1891 — and that it will be even warmer today: the low this morning was 57, about ten degrees above a typical daytime high for this time of year, and this afternoon we'll see 75 or so. This is the sort of Epiphany I can deal with.

Oh, yes, the bottom falls out Monday night. You knew it wouldn't last.

When Internet Explorer 4 was launched in 1997, Chairman Bill issued the following drone:

That was for official consumption. Behind the scenes, something entirely different was going on:

The record shows that Microsoft took one last shot at Netscape — in an "Easter egg" hidden in IE 5.

Now, of course, Netscape is dead and IE isn't quite the monolith Microsoft had hoped, and I have to wonder: how could people who were tacitly allowed to have fun, as the merry IE 4 pranksters were, ever go on to develop nasty stuff like Genuine Windows Advantage? Must have been a different team, I guess.

I get a lot of search-engine traffic for "nude old farts" and variations thereof, not so much because my own flatulence is especially mature — at least, I don't think it is — but because there's a perception that people who doff their duds at vacation time tend to be people who knew Methuselah personally.

Tom Mulhall, who runs the Terra Cotta Inn, acknowledged as much last summer:

I have yet to verify this empirically — and 55, for me, is less than a year away anyway — but I have reason to believe there is indeed an abundance of older folk in this, um, industry. Exhibit A: renewal notice from AANR, rendered on a dot-matrix printer. Not even in near-letter quality, for Pete's sake. And I thought I had creeping Luddite tendencies.

Your search giants, your Googles and Yahoos and such, don't really have time, or at least don't bother to make time, to go through the logs looking for sick and twisted stuff.

Me, on the other hand....

Shoplifting Policy Lowes:  They're against it.

"blade ruiner":  I suppose you'll have to go to Lowe's for a new one.

what size condom should i wear with a 5 inch penis:   I'd avoid anything with a picture of the Incredible Hulk on the box.

i used to be a tree:  And before that, a nut?

what man could do six hundred years ago in entertainment:  Well, some prince or other made some noises about partying like it's 1399.

One Ounce of Silver buys five gallons of gas:  Although you have to pay inside, as the pumps aren't calibrated to accept precious metals.

fun looks like google:  But does Google look like fun?

what's wrong with Diane Rehm why does she sound like a Hepburn:  Why would this be a problem? (Unless it's the late Canadian weightlifter Doug Hepburn.)

scuzzbuckets aforethought:  Because you don't want spontaneous scuzzbucketry.

"joe biden" flatulence:  "All right, that's it, out of the caucus. Now."

silly string breast augmentation:  I suppose it would work at first, but the stuff tends to migrate.

"ring cycle" wagner "dance mix":  The Rhinemaidens can really shake that thing.

lance cargill caught by cleaning crew:  So that's what those "100 ideas" were all about.

I've seen this at I See Invisible People and at The Motley Oklahoman, and I figure I'd give it a shot.

So acknowledged. Here we go:

Father went to college
Father finished college
Mother went to college
Mother finished college
Have any relative who is an attorney, physician, or professor
Were the same or higher class than your high school teachers
Had more than 50 books in your childhood home
Had more than 500 books in your childhood home
Were read children’s books by a parent
Had lessons of any kind before you turned 18
Had more than two kinds of lessons before you turned 18
The people in the media who dress and talk like me are portrayed positively
Had a credit card with your name on it before you turned 18
Your parents (or a trust) paid for the majority of your college costs
Your parents (or a trust) paid for all of your college costs
Went to a private high school
Went to summer camp
Had a private tutor before you turned 18
Family vacations involved staying at hotels
Your clothing was all bought new before you turned 18
Your parents bought you a car that was not a hand-me-down from them
There was original art in your house when you were a child
Had a phone in your room before you turned 18
You and your family lived in a single family house
Your parent(s) owned their own house or apartment before you left home
You had your own room as a child
Participated in an SAT/ACT prep course
Had your own TV in your room in High School
Owned a mutual fund or IRA in High School or College
Flew anywhere on a commercial airline before you turned 16
Went on a cruise with your family
Went on more than one cruise with your family
Your parents took you to museums and art galleries as you grew up
You were unaware of how much heating bills were for your family

Notes: Most of my college costs were covered by a scholarship; there were five kids, so a room to one's own was something that existed only in dreams; I was the oldest, so there were no hand-me-downs available; I once calculated the volume of the oil drum out back, but I never looked into the price of filling it up.

Update, 8 pm: The estimable John Scalzi sees a problem with the methodology in use here:

"Privilege" itself is a buzzword these days, and should be approached warily in any event. Maybe I should say simply that I was damn lucky to get what I did when I did.

Lileks discovers news via Nintendo:

I like it, but it wouldn't fly: some nitwit would complain that his candidate is being mocked, and this will not stand.

On the other hand, Kucinich fans might find it amusing.

Contents of my most recent Bag O'Crap:

6 2Wire PC Port Phoneline 10Mbps USB Adapter [$144.00]
1 MGM Grand "EFX" Plastic Dragon w/Castle Figurine [$5.00]
1 "Flying Thing" #7 — Monstermobile [$0.49]
1 GI Joe Dog Tag/Bracelet set [$2.27]
1 Elgee Water Blaster [$0.29]
3 Faded Glory Pink Butterfly Luggage Tags [$11.64]
1 Tenba D-Series Prodigital Cable Management/Accessory Organizer Set [$19.99]

Total $183.68

Previous crap here. Other recipients have listed their, um, items at BagsOfCrap.com.

This place has been littered lately by nondescript TrackBacks from Thorny Path and Blog Bookmarker, which bill themselves as "social bookmarking" services: think Facebook plus StumbleUpon.

Blog Bookmarker seems to exist only to draw people into something called Hey! Nielsen, as in "Nielsen ratings," an extension of the company's research into Web 2.0, or at least 1.5. I've picked up a smidgen of traffic here and there from them, but only a smidgen; then again, most of the stuff I write is of scant interest to the sort of people Nielsen would like to research, and come to think of it, it's not impossible that this sentence could have ended quite a bit earlier. Thorny Path at least will let you look at some of the tagged items.

I had high hopes for sk*rt, a sort of Digg for dames, if you will, which hasn't taken off quite the way I'd expected despite its palpable No Boys Allowed vibe, a major selling point in some circles. Still, I've been known to hunt down stories through sk*rt, knowing that (1) I have a fair number of female readers and (2) there's a lot of stuff down that way to which I'm otherwise quite oblivious. If only one of these services should survive, this is the one I consider the keeper. Besides, they don't clutter up my database with TrackBacks.

This one sounds simple, ends up less so. The idea: create a fake band and their first album. Here's how it works:

1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
   The first article title on the page is the name of your band.

2. http://www.quotationspage.com/random.php3
   The last four words of the very last quote is the title of your album.

3. http://www.flickr.com/explore/interesting/7days/
   The third picture, no matter what it is, will be your album cover.
   

I admit to having fudged a bit on the last item. Not wishing to step on some photographer's copyright, I took the third photo in the current list with a suitable Creative Commons license.

Anyway, here's the Wikipedia entry, here's the quote (from its own page), and this is the original photo. Behold:

Not available on iTunes.

(Via Steph Mineart.)

The ol' work box hadn't been that much of a sluggard up to that point. At the heart of it is an AMD Sempron 2800+, despite its name a 1.6-GHz CPU, not a speedster but not a boat anchor either. And usually it runs with some small degree of enthusiasm: for some reason it opens one database (this particular solution is based on FileMaker Pro, not that that should make a difference) substantially faster than my P4 dual-core box at home ever does.

In an effort to diagnose the problem, I first fired up Control Panel / System, with the intent of poking into Device Manager. The usual System Information stuff fell into place at subsonic speeds, and it ended with "192 MB RAM."

One ninety-two? Holy substrate, Batman, did someone steal a DIMM? This box, when I got it, had two units of memory: a 256-megger and a 512. Total 768, minus 64 for the integrated video. The only explanation: the 512 stick was stuck.

I powered down, spat in the general direction of the power switch, and restarted. BIOS screen shows 768; all is well. Until the next reboot, of course.

Under the circumstances, I did what any reasonable person would: I whined to supervisory personnel. New RAM should be arriving presently.

"We are always very disappointed if we see retailers that are pricing the Wii or any of our products above the MSRP price."

So said Reggie Fils-Aimé, Nintendo's American boss, and apparently he was sufficiently disappointed to do something about it. Kotaku reports:

This is the sound of a bubble bursting:

There is, however, a practical limit to how much a manufacturer can rein in either retailers or the secondary market, as Nissan is finding out:

Excluding the inevitable "destination charge," the GT-R will list for $69,850, or about the price of 280 Wiis — at MSRP, anyway.

The WNBA's Seattle Storm has been sold and will not be relocating, to Oklahoma City or anywhere else:

From an AP story at the Oklahoman:

I guess I'm pleased with this, not for any personal lack of interest in the WNBA myself, but for the simple fact that numbered among my circle of online friends are some serious Storm fans in the Seattle area, and I figure they'll be delighted at the news.

And running down the blogroll, I find that I figure correctly:

This is, I think, the first time anyone in Seattle has ever accused Clay Bennett of having any sense.

Update, 2 pm: The AP fills in the blanks:

Best of luck to the new owners.

This has to be a hit:

It would be nice if you could remove it without taking half your face with it, too.

"Oh, you're always complaining," piped up the Invisible Girlfriend from the corner.

I've had nothing to say about the DVD Format Wars, except that I was sort of rooting for Sony's Blu-ray to lose, because, well, it's Sony's, and God knows what sort of malfeasance they'll bake into it in the future.

This has nothing to do with DVDs, but it doesn't make me feel any better about Sony either:

Think about that for a moment:

Could this possibly be any more cumbersome? Let's not give them any ideas.

(Via Laurence Simon.)

New game shows, of course! Tickle the Angry Scorpion (doesn't that sound like a band name?) might be a hit, though I've got my doubts about Do Calculus While We Poke You.

Then again, what I really want to see is Estonian Idol.

If for some inexplicable reason you've been wanting to cruise on down the road in a Mercury, you might want to do it now while you still can:

Last year 168,422 Mercury vehicles found homes, along with 131,487 Lincolns. Your local L-M dealer is going to look at these numbers and yell that Ford is taking away 56 percent of his business. If Ford does right by Lincoln, that dealer will be mollified by the fact that he's getting higher margins, even if he winds up selling fewer units. But at the moment, doing right by Lincoln takes serious money, and any serious money Ford has to spend on Lincoln is money that won't be spent on what's left of Mercury.

A solution occasionally proffered is the Saturnization of Mercury: turning it into a conduit for European imports. And Ford has some spiffy Euromodels out there: a Focus a generation ahead of ours, a compact people mover (C-MAX), and the newest Mondeo. But this has been tried before — seen any Merkurs lately? — and the exchange rate right now is ruinous. I figure the 70th Anniversary Mercury, due out in 2009, might be the marque's swan song.

I admit, though, that I, for one, will miss Jill Wagner.

Back in the Pleistocene era, I had one of Mattel's Intellivision consoles with the infamous disc controllers. The discs had good motion but just didn't compare to real joysticks, and in a week or so I'd scored a couple of plastic joystick tops that epoxied to the discs, killing the system's presumed resale value but adding serious win to my gameplay.

And one day, feeling full of myself, I connected the gamebox to the Betamax, fired up Activision's Pitfall!, and twisted and twirled and jumped all the way to the final screen. For a couple of years I showed the tape to anyone who was interested and rather a lot of people who weren't.

I had, of course, no idea that Pitfall Harry himself was something of a bad egg, or I would never have worked so closely with him.

Forms W-2 were distributed today at the shop, about four days later than usual, though this is easily explained by personnel changes in the Lonely Financial Zone.

Of course, other tax-related documents will show up at the last possible moment.

Perhaps not safe for reading out loud:

If you still care after that, here's a Time article about the study.

This week's Carnival of the Vanities is dubbed "Picc" by Andrew Ian Dodge; he doesn't explain the title, but I hope he's not referring to one of these, which looks sort of painful.

Oh, about the number 265? It's what they call a Smith number: the sum of its digits is equal to the sum of the digits in its prime factorization. (It's 5 x 53; 5 + 5 + 3 = 2 + 6 +5.) I threw this in just so I could mention its origin:

On a landline, anyway, Mr Smith is probably a long-distance call away, and your long-distance carrier (and inevitably, you) will be paying a PICC.

Maybe bigger, depending on your level of cynicism. The NBA's Hornets (remember them?) have renegotiated their lease at the New Orleans Arena, and the new expiration date is 2014, two years later than the previous lease. But now there's an early-out clause:

Not counting last night's game with the Lakers, the Hornets are averaging 11,871, which has to be discouraging for a team that's tied with the Mavericks and half a game behind the Spurs. And here's a kick: the Bees are 9-6 at home and 14-5 on the road. (The Mavs, away from Dallas, are a ghastly 7-8.) Not that I'd suggest the Hornets would rather be somewhere else entirely; after all, they just signed an extension of their lease, right?

Update: The Bees drew 15,605 against the Lakers, who won 109-80.

As I've mentioned more than once — searching this site for the brand name produces thirteen mentions, in fact — during my younger days I managed to wangle some seat time in a Maserati. Despite the presence of the revered trident midgrille, it really wasn't a sports car: it had four doors, for Pietro's sake. But you couldn't tell me that while I was whipping it around Lake Hefner at, um, slightly above the posted limit.

Still, some aspects of it struck me as goofy. My ride in those days had a five-speed stick; what in the world was this hyperexpensive sled doing with a three-speed autobox? (Answer: about 100 before I looked down at the speedo on the way to the lake.) Eventually, though, I accepted this as part of the experience: la donna, she has her quirks, but she's so beautiful you don't notice.

At least, you hope you never notice something like this:

This isn't as insane as, say, front fender skirts on the postwar Nash, which made for a turning circle more appropriate to Kenworths, but it's still a strange sort of lapse, unless there's some trick trunk release somewhere.

Matsushita Electric Industrial Company, founded in 1918 by Konosuke Matsushita, is about to fade into history. The huge Japanese conglomerate is taking the name of its leading brand: Panasonic Corp.

The Japanese do not undertake such changes lightly:

The change will take place in October. Buyers of Panasonic equipment might not even notice. On the other hand, this may improve the company's Web profile, in case your ISP or your workplace filters out words like "Matsushita."

Tata's new Nano, argues Samir Sayed, is the first step toward truly disposable cars:

One lakh, in Indian parlance, is 100,000 rupees, or around $2500 US.

The Nano seats five if they're really good friends — you have to figure they're not spending their rupees on cheeseburgers — and is motivated by a 0.6-liter inline two. (You were expecting a V?) Gas mileage is guesstimated at 54 mpg, though it's unlikely we'll ever see one of them undergoing the official EPA test.

Rival automaker Bajaj, in the meantime, has already announced a more upscale car for a whole three grand.

That's no longer the question; the contractor hired by the city picked up the Assorted Tree Segments on my block today, a bit sooner than I'd anticipated despite my comparative proximity to the center of town. (I am, as the phrase goes, out of the loop.)

They didn't seem to leave a whole lot of crud behind, though one house was skipped entirely; I'm guessing that someone was parked in front of the curb, preventing access to the stuff.

Addendum, 8:15 pm: The CityNews flyer that accompanies the utility bill contains the following revelation:

But not until, so don't mix your regular Big Junk with your tree limbs.

My original cell-phone contract didn't even mention text messages, and my old phone made the task of sending them unduly difficult, so I never got into the habit. I'd been off contract for a few years, and decided to re-up in order to snag a newer phone, and while I still have the same number of minutes and the same monthly rate, any text messages after the first fifty are billed at 15 cents each.

I didn't think much about this until I saw some Usenet item to the effect that this was the most expensive bandwidth in the solar system, and then, of course, I had to think about it.

SMS as implemented on GSM maxes out at 160 7-bit characters, the equivalent of 140 8-bit bytes, or 140/1024 = 0.1367 kilobytes. At fifteen cents a whack, this is $1.097 per K; multiply by 1048576 and you get the startling figure of $1.15 million per gigabyte. (By comparison, my Web host offers 5 terabytes for as low as six bucks a month.)

Trini would scoff. "Upgrade to a plan with unlimited texting," she'd say, reasonably enough, and this wouldn't cost a ton of money. But what I'm allowed is way more than I anticipate using; typically, I have four or five text messages a month. By contrast, she's using four or five an hour.

And how often do you get to see that?

Karl Rove was reportedly nowhere near Parliament at the time.

(Spotted by Emalyse.)

Oklahoma City, after expanding its list of plastics to be recycled, has pared it back a tad, and they've updated the pertinent okc.gov page accordingly. I quote from CityNews:

Meat trays I've seen tend to be foamy black or grey stuff. Then again, I prefer to pass up the prepacks in favor of something from behind the counter — which is generally wrapped in paper.

This would seem to cover most of the pertinent circumstances:

(Via Tam.)

Everyone knows the big problem with solar power: it's called sunset.

Perhaps it won't remain a problem much longer:

They're still a few years away, though:

If I remember my circuit theory, it's not the frequency that switches back and forth, but getting things down to 60 Hz doesn't sound like an insurmountable difficulty.

(Via AutoblogGreen.)

I think I've seen exactly this in the fine print:

I wonder if Frank was a big Mitt Romney fan.

As anyone who's ever looked at the lower end of the front-page sidebar will know, I'm a major WordPad fiend, not because it's a wonderful text editor — it's okay, but nothing spellbinding, as it were — but because I've been using it so long that I've managed to pound it into some semblance of submission: ninety-something percent of the time, I can get it to do what I want with no fuss.

A couple of weeks ago, I was working up a Vent, and at some point shy of completion I decided I'd better save my work. Up popped a telltale Microsoft box to the effect that "The document is in use by another application or user and cannot be accessed." I copied out all the text to another file, canceled the save, rebooted, and later pasted it back. No problems.

A few days later, on a project at work, I got the same message. Trini wondered if maybe this was NTFS telling us that it couldn't rewrite the file because of bad disk sectors, and we cranked up a long and tedious disk diagnostic, which reported no errors. After a couple of hours, I offered a suggestion, but had no real way to test it — until last night, when it cropped up once more.

Rewind about twelve months, to the point where I installed Copernic Desktop Search, which gets used on a regular basis on both these boxes, mostly because Microsoft's own search facility, functional in Windows 98, descended to the level of farce in XP. Copernic spends a lot of time indexing your files at first; once it's done, it sneaks in under the radar to add any new ones when it sees you're not especially busy.

Reasoning that well, what the hell else could it be, I got the dialog box, canceled my save, and suspended Copernic's index function. It complained, of course; but once it had been ordered off the premises, the save worked as it was supposed to. Apparently once it's spotted a file, it puts a lock on it until it's finished updating the index — which, if your nonbusy periods fall at the wrong time, might not have taken place yet when you're ready to resave.

Mystery solved. I'd be unbelievably smug were my track record better than 1 for X, where X is a larger integer than I'd care to admit.

The 4:24 AM version of the local Forecast Discussion:

This describes DGEX. A typical DGEX map might look something like this.

Once upon a time I zinged poor Chris Muir for some extremely-trivial pop-culture goof, and I suspect he made a solemn vow to himself never to go through that sort of thing again. Anyway, this one was perfect:

Here's the album in question:

Whole lot of tears on that record, you know?

You may not have noticed this, but the sidebar is now two pixels wider.

For the last 27 hours or so, KHBZ-FM (94.7 / The Buzz) has been playing Metallica nonstop (except for commercials) and warning of something happening Monday morning at 10 am. The rumor machine is running flat-out, and at this moment someone on Wikipedia has floated the possibility of a Spanish format — or of KTOK-FM.

I tend to doubt either of these, but then the format change I predicted for the first of the year — at KQOB-FM (96.9 / Bob FM) — didn't happen, so I figure I have no reason to think I'm actually correct.

Update, 10 am, Monday morning: Big deal. I don't remember anyone in town saying "You know, I really like the KATT. In fact, I like them so much I think every station should try to sound like the KATT."

And now, another case where I knew that something existed, but had no idea what it might be called.

"It," in this case, is "machinima", a sort of squoze-down version of "machine cinema," and it's just what you think it is: computer-generated video. It's derived, though, not from the hyperexpensive 3D animation software you see at the movies, but from comparatively-simple desktop-based stuff. And there is an advantage to this: you can do the renderings in real time, rather than have to set up acres of rendering hardware and wait for them to crunch zillions of numbers. So it looks patently artificial, but it's still massive fun, and when actual artists get hold of it, the results are inspiring.

Dawn Eden put up a remarkable example of machinima, a music video set to the Crests' "The Angels Listened In," designed by Charlemange Fezza of Pew Man Fu Studios using the technology of The Sims. I was properly impressed, scanned through more than a dozen more of Charlemange's works — she has her own YouTube channel — and decided to post her take on B. J. Thomas's original, ooga-chaka-free version of "Hooked on a Feeling."

By the time she's done, she'll probably have the entire Left Banke catalog animated.

I bought three presumably-fresh bars of Dial yesterday, something I hadn't done in a while, mostly because some time ago I decided I would go ahead and use up all the accumulated hotel soap from the last few World Tours, which took many days.

And I thought I had quite a bit of the stuff, but I am the rankest of amateurs compared to Elisson.

At about 10:15 everything went dark, or as dark as it can manage two and a half hours after sunrise, and for some reason I was spooked. I get through an ice storm of epic proportions with no more than flicker, and now, on a sunny morning, the power is down?

I did the perfunctory check of the breaker box, called OG&E, grabbed a snow shovel, and began cleaning up at curbside, mostly because it beat the hell out of just sitting there waiting for something to happen. (This is, incidentally, the best time to hobnob with the neighbors, because they're always coming outside to see if anybody else has power.)

According to SystemWatch, about 3000 people got knocked off the grid; half have been restored. I doubt that any trees were involved.

The only clock I bother to set on the living-room entertainment gear is on the VCR/DVD recorder combo, and it's kind enough not to blink 12:00 after power outages (1:00 after power outages during DST); instead, it picks up where it left off and moves along. The clock was already two minutes behind, so the half-hour it spent without juice knocked it to 32 minutes behind. I groaned, picked up the remote for the TV — this is one of those recorders where everything is done through on-screen menus — and got: nothing.

It's not like I'd never had a battery die in a remote before, so I swapped out a pair of AAs and started over. Nothing. "Jeebus, Sony, what is it this time?" I grumbled as I dug up the TV set manual. Okay, fine: use the front-panel buttons under the drop-down panel, which conveniently were already dropped down since that's where the LaserDisc plugs in. I had a picture on channel 61 (the Hitler History Channel), but the channel number in the corner was counting down as fast as it possibly could, and none of the front-panel buttons would work except the power switch. The remote was still deader than Mike Gravel's Presidential bid.

A search for "sony wega controls unresponsive" turned up this thread:

Apparently Sony has never heard of this issue either.

I'd taken the trouble to remove all the other remotes from the area, on the off-chance that they were being read by mistake, so the only conclusion I can reach is that something fooled the infrared sensor into thinking it was getting a crapload of instructions all at once, and eventually it quit doing that.

I note for comparison that every time I've had some weird response, or lack of response, from the Vizio in the bedroom, disconnecting it from the power supply for sixty seconds has reset it without screwing with my personal settings.

Fetiche decided that the last pair of shoes I put up here had no redeeming social value — truth be told, I didn't think much of them myself — so this time around I decided to post some shoes she actually owns. From the BCBGirls line of BCBG Max Azria, this is "Lora," a higher-than-usual (four inches or so) Mary Jane with a squared-off toe, also available in red. (BCBG, it appears, is an abbreviation for a French idiom: bon chic, bon genre, "good style, good class." And who would know more about French idioms than a Jewish-American designer of Tunisian extraction?) I took one look at these and thought, "Dillard's, one-twenty-five." Actually, Dillard's doesn't list them among the 95 pairs of BCBGirls shoes on their Web site, but $125 seems a tad high; they can be had online from other vendors for $110 or so, and for that matter, Dillard's has all the in-store BCBGirls shoes on sale this week.

In this more-or-less weekly feature, we sort through seven days' worth of referrer logs, separate the wheat from the chaff, and publish the chaff.

hissiest uzis:  Yeah, that's the lethal aspect of the Uzi: the hiss.

I survived the 2007 Ice storm even though I lost a few limbs in Tulsa t-shirt:  Should we assume it's just a flesh wound?

Superheroines Itching:  "Sue, honey, you want me to scratch that for you?" Reed shouted from the lab.

required to wear pantyhose to church:  Try new GenuFlex™, designed specifically for kneeling.

what happens if a man falls in love with a transsexual?  If he's really in love, he probably won't even use the T-word.

family won't accept me wearing women's lingerie:  Suggestion: get your own. They hate it when you borrow things.

driving naked on leather seats:  Don't. Trust me on this.

Mother-in-law is curious about my penis size:  Let me dissuade you with two words: "divorce lawyer."

topless bimmer chicks:  Is this topless chicks in Bimmers, or chicks in topless Bimmers?

topless babes in bimmers:  Well, that answers that. [Both were received from the same IP address.]

what's the plural form of stereo:  Surround.

dog peed on dvd player:  Was it HD or Blu-ray?

What do 43 percent of women do in the driver's seat:  Demonstrate to the man in the passenger seat the art of asking directions.

sociopath, adulterer or libertine:  Great, a new reality TV show.

A passel of Tufts University students have put up a blog to — well, the subtitle says it all:

One post so far, from "The Minions," who advise:

I need hardly point out that Laurence Simon objects to his traffic being called "significant." Still, the name for this new enterprise is indeed critical, and to show that I have a heart, I offer an even number of half-hearted suggestions:

• The Huffington Pissed
  
• 19-Year-Old Women With Large Breasts
  
• Like Glenn Reynolds, But Without Saying "Heh"
  
• We Thought They Were Saying "Woo-burn"
  
• Carbohydrate Wisdom
  
• My36DD
  
• Bin Laden, Done That
  
• Duncan Hunter Read This Once
  
• Panic! At The Bursar's
  
• 20-Year-Old Women With Large Breasts
  

You're very welcome.

Update: They've tweaked a few things, including the tag line, which now contains the phrase "wait till Dad finds out", and The Minions have given way to The Perfessor.

That Community Chest card is slightly more likely than this email received yesterday: