During a one-hour period yesterday, someone's botnet planted about 100 bogus TrackBacks here, connected to a whole link farm full of Yahoo! 360 blogs which were probably created by a botnet.

Not that I'd tell you to ban everything incoming that mentions Yahoo! 360, but until such time as they can come up with some semblance of security — don't hold your breath — you might want to think twice about anything that shows up with their domain on it. (I did leave them a nastygram, which so far has garnered only an autoresponse.)

Update, 9:30 am: Yahoo! responds:

Their definition of "appropriate" probably differs from mine — I doubt that broadswords even occurred to them — but I suppose we can consider this matter closed for now.

The May Day edition of Carnival of the Vanities is, as you'd expect, hosted by Dodgeblogium, a well-established WordPress blog which is not using Paul Stamatiou's 281 theme.

And be prepared to weep:

The current state of things: you could probably sell a bar made from feldspar and duck droppings so long as it has zero grams of trans fat.

Seriously. A local paint store once advertised "100% CARB FREE PAINT". Sold like hotcakes. With some form of syrup, I presume.

It's the fifth anniversary of BatesLine, and, courtesy of the Wayback Machine, here's a look at the first month's worth of posts.

And there's no arguing with this:

And he does say so himself, which is why I've read Michael Bates for about 4.95 of those five years: you know where he stands, and he has a pretty good idea where the bodies are buried.

Each week I put together a collection of strange search-engine queries, and I discard rather a lot of queries which aren't strange at all but do perplex me somewhat: some folks appear to believe that there exist nude photographs of everyone on earth, and if they word their search strings carefully enough, those photographs will be found.

The Academic Naturist argues that privacy is being sufficiently diminished by technology that those of us who occasionally don't bother to get dressed will eventually be Googlable, or worse. One substantial threat comes from Microsoft Windows Live:

But it's nothing compared to this:

I knew there was a reason I'd never bothered to unpack, let alone connect, my webcam.

Oklahoma City, says Forbes, is right now the most "recession-proof" town in the land:

On the other hand, AskMen.com says you might not want to drop by for a visit:

Unpredictable, certainly; frightening, not after you've been here a little while. And I was here for the 1999 twister: do I look devastated? Don't answer that.

Emalyse reports on potential problems at the low end of Britain's wage scale:

I found it interesting that the UK's minimum wage varies with the age of the wage-earner; we used to have a so-called "training wage" in the States, but the primary criterion was lack of experience, not age, and anyway it was allowed to die in 1993.

But what was fascinating about this was the backstory on the "abolition of the 10p tax rate." The Guardian (yes, yes, I know, I know) put out a Q&A page on the matter, and get a load of this:

There's only one other bracket: forty percent, which kicks in at £36,000.

Dr. Weevil's secret to jazzing up ramen:

The disadvantage, of course, is that the improvements bring up the price of the meal, from "darn near nothing" to "not a whole lot," which may make a difference to the stereotypical Starving Student who subsists largely on ramen. Still, even real pho isn't that pricey, at least here in the Big Breezy, which has a substantial resident Vietnamese population.

It occurs to me that if she'd boinked, oh, let's say, Jesse Helms, that would be news.

It's a tie, and it could have been even more of one.

I had three different excerpts scissored out from this Kathy Shaidle update, and finally narrowed it down to this one:

This is the sort of ferocity for which God stops His Yamaha so He can hear it better.

Meanwhile, David Freddoso glances at the current conventional climate wisdom:

See the Yamaha reference, supra.

Someone who had to fight with IBM's PCjr would probably not think so: Junior shipped with some weird plastic slab to which someone had superglued sixty-two pieces of Dentyne.

On the other hand, you can still touch-type, sort of, on Junior, which you can't do on a vintage-2008 Dell Vostro 1310:

(Via Megan McArdle.)

Even if you think you want to convert some YouTube nonsense to QuickTime, trust me: you really don't want to.

I'm just saying.

An incident in Tulsa:

And so Dr Cooper reportedly defends the perimeter:

You see, Doc, this is why we have guns: so we don't have to go after people with a mere baseball bat.

Dr Cooper lives on Erie south of 101st. I recommend that you stay off his lawn.

I suspect the boffins at Chevrolet are pleased with the results of this Popular Mechanics road test, in which a 2008 Malibu with a four-cylinder engine and a six-speed automatic returned almost 30 mpg over a 500-mile trip.

And I was fairly impressed myself — the best I've done on a World Tour was 30.7 mpg in 2005 — until I got to the very last paragraph:

Thirty-seven hundred pounds? Christ on a Krispy Kreme, as Rachel Lucas might say. In 2005 I was driving a Mazda 626, a car in the same size class as the Malibu, admittedly lacking some of the Chevy's features but still with "all the normal power accessories," and it weighed less than 3000 lb. My current ride is replete with electric servants, has ten percent more interior room, and comes in around 3400. Are they putting ballast in these things, or what?

(Via Autoblog Green.)

It was another day in the yard, this time to trim back some of the shrubbery, and about thirty gallons of cuttings into the process, I noticed that the ol' ticker was running about 50 percent faster than normal. I wasn't exactly out of breath or anything, but I could feel the beat, which is usually the sort of thing I find alarming.

This spring, though, I've had quite a few incidents like this, and I'm starting to think that this raggedy old body is laboring under the delusion that it's getting some real live exercise. What's more, there's a chance that it actually might be. Consider: I own an electric trimmer, but I did all of today's work with hand tools, and besides the shear motion, there's a fair amount of stretching and bending involved. Even mowing with the electric constitutes a workout of sorts: apart from the acrobatics connected with dodging the cord at every turn, doing the 5500-square-foot back yard in 18-inch strips results in a walk on the far side of half a mile. (The front yard is smaller, but it's also steeper.)

Recovery time has been at most a couple of minutes, and at no point — except, well, now — have I felt that omigod I'm setting myself up for a myocardial infarction or anything like that. Then again, it was only 65 degrees this afternoon, about ten below the seasonal spec. Ask me in August when it's a hundred and four in the shade if I feel just the same.

Matt Stone, in the June '08 Motor Trend:

It's Italian. Duh.

One small bit of serendipity yesterday: I'd earned a 10-percent-off day at Target, due to vigorous use of my Red Card at their pharmacy, and they had my choice of HVAC filter for $8.99, a buck off the usual, so I wound up shelling out $32.36 for a year's worth.

This is a standard-sized filter, nominally 14 x 25 x 1. In practice, it measures more like 13.7 x 24.7 x 1. Also in practice, it's apparently still too wide for its slot: it takes some serious bending and wedging to get the darn thing into place, and it's a good thing I only have to do this every 90 days or so. Curiously, the vents where I work take this same size, and it simply slides into place with no issues.

I should point out that when I arrived here in 2003, I found a so-called "permanent" filter which looked like a giant Scotch-Brite pad; it appeared to have been there since the Devonian period. I duly vacuumed up the crud and returned it to duty, but the first time I had the system serviced, the technician gave me that "How could you?" look and installed what he considered a proper filter, which was indeed labeled 14 x 25 x 1. And he didn't work up a sweat in so doing, either.

The next width down is a nominal 12, which means about 11.6, which will fall through the mounting and into the Phantom Zone, so that's out. Is it just me, or do other people have to wrestle with this minor detail?

Mick Jagger asked that about forty years ago, and neither he nor we did a very thorough job of it: they crawl out of the woodwork every time some character who imagines himself a man of wealth and taste decides he needs to relive his younger days one last time.

About three years ago, Emilio Estevez started work on a dramatization of RFK's life, which appeared the following year as Bobby. And the new Vanity Fair offers a brand-spanking-new hagiography this month. On the cover: Bobby Kennedy: The Hope, The Tragedy, And Why He Still Matters. Inside, an excerpt from Thurston Clarke's The Last Campaign: Robert F. Kennedy and 82 Days That Inspired America [New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2008]. Inasmuch as nothing really has changed on this front, I have no qualms about reprinting what I said about the Estevez project:

And, well, there's always room for Jello.

Meanwhile, how much does the Real World, the sort of people who couldn't get into Graydon Carter's restaurant, give a damn about this? Not much: they're busy fuming over Hannah Montana's shoulder blades. This was to be expected: when given a choice between two utter trivialities, it's fairly normal to select the newer one, and as Mr Jagger has already noted, all the sinners these days are saints.

From last fall:

And if the age were right, it would have to have incremented yesterday.

Which it did. Damn.

However, this still applies:

Now if it should turn out that she wrote her thesis on some aspect of the French and Indian War, well, dumb luck on my part, but I'm still not sending a friend request.

I seem to have lost my "B" set of keys. The "C" set is where it always is, and the "A" set is with the car keys and such, but the "B" keys, which are the ones I usually carry for working in the back yard, have disappeared. Oddly, yesterday I didn't pick up this ring, as I already had the "A" keys with me.

I am just paranoid enough to want to get the locks changed — there are three — but not enough to call out a locksmith on a weekend. (Any local folks who can recommend one, please do so; I haven't had to do this sort of thing in ages.)

It's hard to add anything to this:

Fat chance, say I. Says Rocket Jones:

It would take an awful lot of Cracker Jack^® and brewskis to wash that down.

Received this weekend from, it says, irs.us (ha!):

The link, I need hardly point out, doesn't go to the government; it goes to a site in South Korea.

This last touch, though, is almost charming in a cynical sort of way:

It is to laugh.

What are today's World Citizens seeking? Hell if I know. All I get is stuff like this.

my bose cube speaker fell and split in half. How can I fix it?  Hint: You have to bring the separated halves back together.

video sound warrants real name criminal records fringer prints photos of all court officials state an federal level of statecourt hampton county even accademy memebers of norman c roy's death in july 5th 1992 docket 92-1993:  There is such a thing as Search String Overkill, and this is Exhibit A.

just show me how too replace frigging halfton dash lights:  This is Exhibit B.

disagree on compact fluorescent bulbs:  Too late now, Bunkie.

pathetic car tax oklahoma excise:  Yes, it is true: you buy a car in Oklahoma, no matter how pathetic it is, you will pay an excise tax.

mccain condoleeza rice romulan durst:  One of these things is not like the other. I hope.

can you bake crystal meth in an apartment and other people cannot smell it?  They'll smell it when you burn the building down, for sure.

i want to sue kellogg for severe pop tart burn:  Smelled like crystal meth, did it?

"kim jong il" defecation lawn:  The Dear Leader can crap wherever he pleases.

how to make furniture look antique:  Just wait a few decades.

flying termites does listerine works:  Has bad breath been a problem for termites?

invisible women in pantyhose on youtube:  Um, did you consider searching at YouTube?

I can't imagine any way I could ever fill up all the Web space I'm paying for, and no doubt this is one reason why I clutter up the archives with an additional 150 pages or so every single month. (Another is sheer packratitude, a tendency I exhibit in Real Life, despite the urgent need for occasional decrapification.)

Not everyone is quite so indifferent to the load. For example:

My own database is only about 16 MB right now, but it got up close to 75 before it crashed in September '06, and I shudder every time I go through a mass rebuild. Still, all the old pages remain in stasis, which is helping to choke the life out of everything:

Which brings us back to packratitude (packrattery?). A vicious circle, this.

That's about the only way I can explain how the same design house — Roberto Cavalli — that came up with this lovely little sandal...

... also came up with this monstrous clunker:

Even the Manolo seems perplexed.

CQ Politics has come up with something called VP Madness, in which you get to select John McCain's running mate, kinda sorta. (A similar scheme for the Democrats will be rolled out "once the nominee is set.")

It will be interesting to see how the results compare with the suggestions in Baseball Crank's GOP Veepstakes.

(Swiped from the California Yankee.)

Sk*rt, a sort of Digg for Dames, is changing its name for some reason. Of the finalists, I'm partial to "Lemonade," if only because they've suggested that they'd go to the trouble of snarfing up a German domain for it: it would perforce be lemona.de. I think "Kirtsy" will win, though.

Trini sent me a download link for the newest Nine Inch Nails project, The Slip, which was offered as a Zip file full of variable-rate MP3s or, if you do torrents, Apple Lossless, FLAC or actual .wav files. I don't do torrents, so I opted for the MP3s, which sounded decent enough.

Somewhere during the download, I found myself with a horrible thought: What if I actually met NIN's Trent Reznor and he turned out to be your genial, neighborly, 1432 Franklin Pike Circle Hero sort of guy? Surely he can't be this angst-y all the time, especially after having cleaned up 100 percent following some industrial-strength substance abuse.

Or maybe he can, and after some reflection (and listening to the tracks on The Slip), I figured out just what it was I've been responding to in NIN's music. Reznor isn't even close to monochromatic, tonally or emotionally; but his reaction to emotion, as I perceive it anyway, is binary: he confronts it, or he wallows in it. This is very like me, except that I do way more wallowing than confronting. I tossed this notion at Trini, who is more of a NIN fan than I am, and she said that it made sense to her. Then again, I suspect she's still a bit surprised that I, barely on the near side of fifty-five, pay the slightest bit of attention to Nine Inch Nails, especially given my affinity for the Dawn Eden dictum "I don't consider myself legally bound to know about any music past 1968."

Speaking of 1968, Kim du Toit has a nice overview of some choice albums of that year, not all of which have been played to death in the subsequent four decades. Trent Reznor, I note for no particular reason, was three that year.

Note the clever use of the word "improve":

This, of course, could not possibly have anything to do with the fact that the EU mandate for more fuel-efficient cars means less fuel tax flowing into the Dutch treasury. (See, for instance, this Oregon proposal from five years ago.)

"Full deployment" of the system is expected by 2016.

I don't do a lot of grocery shopping at Target, mostly because the Target nearest to me is a couple of rungs short of Super-hood and therefore lacks a lot of grocery-store essentials, but I did have that 10-percent-off card, so while I was picking up stuff like furnace filters at a Target of greater Superness, I poked through the food aisles and turned up a curiosity: "New York Vanilla" ice cream, under their Market Pantry house brand.

One has to assume, given the price of real vanilla, that the flavoring is largely synthetic, but it's a darn good synthetic. The yellowish color hints at the presence of eggs, which I am given to understand are an essential component of true New York Vanilla, but if they're on the ingredient panel, they're concealed behind something science-y. Target HQ being in Minnesota, maybe this is New York Mills Vanilla. It's still pretty good.

I have two cell phones (one Nokia, one Motorola), each of which has its own charging cord, which is always in the last place I look.

That in itself is almost an argument for this gizmo sold by National Geographic:

The device comes with "adapters to fit most Motorola, Samsung, Nokia, and LG phones" and sells for $40. I have some doubts as to whether it will fit my Nokia 6133, but then it has nonstandard everything.

(Via Popgadget.)

I hesitate to say "Now I've seen everything," but there can't be much left on the list beyond four-hundred-dollar flip-flops.

Not only are they more expensive than Crocs, but apparently they're (partly) made from crocs.

(Spied at Gawker.)

This, at least, you can't blame on Saul Alinsky:

(Heisted from HeatherRadish.)

Think you can change the world with your blog? You're deluded, says Professor Bainbridge:

I do in fact have a day job: 45-50 hours a week, most weeks. And while at one time I had a box full of nice (if not exactly mint) uncanceled stamps, I learned early on that philately would get me nowhere.

(Oh, come on. You knew this was coming.)

A fellow riding shotgun in a BMW X5 in Northumberland apparently mooned the speed camera, causing wailing and gnashing of teeth for at least one minion of Her Majesty's Nanny State:

Get a grip, Jer. The camera could have gotten shot at.

(Via Nice Deb.)

Swiped from Fillyjonk, this premise (the explanation apparently originated elsewhere):

Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
Anna Karenina
Crime and Punishment
Catch-22
One Hundred Years of Solitude
Wuthering Heights
The Silmarillion
Life of Pi: a novel
The Name of the Rose
Don Quixote
Moby Dick
Ulysses
Madame Bovary
The Odyssey
Pride and Prejudice
Jane Eyre
The Tale of Two Cities
The Brothers Karamazov
Guns, Germs, and Steel: the fates of human societies
War and Peace
Vanity Fair
The Time Traveler’s Wife
The Iliad
Emma
The Blind Assassin
The Kite Runner
Mrs. Dalloway
Great Expectations
American Gods
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
Atlas Shrugged
Reading Lolita in Tehran: a memoir in books
Memoirs of a Geisha
Middlesex
Quicksilver
Wicked: the life and times of the wicked witch of the West
The Canterbury Tales
The Historian: a novel
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Love in the Time of Cholera
Brave New World
The Fountainhead (note 1)
Foucault’s Pendulum
Middlemarch
Frankenstein
The Count of Monte Cristo
Dracula
A Clockwork Orange
Anansi Boys
The Once and Future King
The Grapes of Wrath
The Poisonwood Bible : a novel
1984
Angels & Demons
The Inferno (and Purgatory and Paradise) (note 2)
The Satanic Verses
Sense and Sensibility
The Picture of Dorian Gray
Mansfield Park
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest
To the Lighthouse
Tess of the D'Urbervilles
Oliver Twist
Gulliver’s Travels
Les Misérables
The Corrections
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
Dune
The Prince
The Sound and the Fury
Angela's Ashes: a memoir
The God of Small Things
A People's History of the United States: 1492-present
Cryptonomicon
Neverwhere
A Confederacy of Dunces
A Short History of Nearly Everything
Dubliners
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
Beloved
Slaughterhouse-Five
The Scarlet Letter
Eats, Shoots & Leaves
The Mists of Avalon
Oryx and Crake: a novel
Collapse: how societies choose to fail or succeed
Cloud Atlas
The Confusion
Lolita
Persuasion
Northanger Abbey
The Catcher in the Rye
On the Road
The Hunchback of Notre Dame
Freakonomics: a rogue economist explores the hidden side of everything
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: an inquiry into values
The Aeneid
Watership Down
Gravity's Rainbow
The Hobbit
In Cold Blood: a true account of a multiple murder and its consequences
White Teeth
Treasure Island
David Copperfield (note 3)
The Three Musketeers

Notes:

• How I finished Atlas Shrugged and not this is amazing.
  
• With apologies to Jim Steinman and/or Meat Loaf, one out of three ain't good.
  
• This is David Copperfield with two Ps by Charles Dickens, not David Coperfield with one P by Edmund Wells.
  

And I could swear I've read Emma, but I can't remember where I picked it up, so I left it off.

Update: First paragraph redone to clarify credits.

The Harley-Davidson guys ran this in a print ad last week in USA Today, and since I would dearly love to see this turn into a cry for a rally, I'm copying it over here. (Because I need the occasional reminder myself, doncha know.)

Words to live by. (With thanks to Peter Michael DeLorenzo.)

I took just enough physics to know that air (or whatever) doesn't leak into tires, so after a particularly rocky ride down a spectacularly godawful stretch of alleged pavement — NE 36th from Kelley to Lincoln, if you're curious — it didn't occur to me to check the tire pressures.

And when I did, they were way the hell out of spec. Nissan calls for 33/30; the fronts were 35, left rear 34, right rear 32.

Now how did this happen? My best guess, and it's not so great, is that the last time Gwendolyn got a spa day, someone thought the Dunlops had done flopped, and gave them an extra shot of air. This strikes me as slightly unlikely, since I'd carefully deleted the "rotate tires" bit from the to-do list, and they certainly didn't rotate them. (The JWL mark is your friend.)

Anyway, after correction, the same stretch of road proved much less likely to bang my head into the sunroof, so I'm assuming that my gauge, despite its age (about five cars now), is still reasonably accurate.

Tip #3409: You're on the drive home and you can't hear the tornado sirens going off because the wind is too loud.

Seriously. On 39th west of Classen I saw a city trash bin, once full of yard waste, upended. And the operative word here is "on": the bin dropped across one lane of traffic, forcing motorists to detour around it, provided of course that they even saw it, black shapes being fairly indistinguishable when the skies have next to no light to give.

As severe thunderstorms go, this one was pretty routine — except that I was actually out in it, which made it look a whole lot worse.

Update: Damage reports are coming in, and apparently the worst of it hit just a couple miles west of me.

Australian writer Bob Ellis, apparently wounded by a Tim Blair taunt, actually comes back with this:

Regular readers of these pages will recognize this particular gambit as Playing the Rob Schneider Card. Background, early 2005:

• Patrick Goldstein, in the Los Angeles Times, took a shot at Deuce Bigalow: European Gigolo, to the effect that it was "sadly overlooked at Oscar time because apparently nobody had the foresight to invent a category for Best Running Penis Joke Delivered by a Third-Rate Comic."

• Deuce Bigalow star Rob Schneider subsequently took out a full-page ad in Variety attacking Goldstein's credentials: "Well Mr. Goldstein, as far as your snide comments about me and my film not being nominated for an Academy Award, I decided to do some research to find what awards you have won. I went online and found that you have won nothing. Absolutely nothing. No journalistic awards of any kind, Disappointed, I went to the Pulitzer Prize database of past winners and nominees. I though, surely, there must be an omission. I typed in the name Patrick Goldstein and again, zippo — nada." And so forth.
  

Which would have been the end of that, except that six months later, Roger Ebert stepped into the fray:

Were I Bob Ellis, I'd be listening carefully for another shoe to drop. Just in case.

It's a good question: "If you knew that in five years one million people would read what you have written, what would you do with that opportunity?"

Traffic has slowed here lately, but in the last five years I have had, yes, upward of one million page views, so I am tempted to say something like "Look upon my works, ye Readers, and despair!"

But that's too easy, and it's not fair to Lynn, who put some serious thought into the things she'd like to say to her visitors.

So instead I'm going to harp on her second piece of advice, which goes like this:

Not to mention that it's a lot easier to get through life if you don't have to have things constantly explained to you. And if you're anything like me, with a tendency to invoke cultural references a bit less ephemeral than the last installment of The Daily Show, it's a lot easier to get through life if you don't have to explain things constantly. (For an illustration of what I mean, see the first three comments to this bit of shoeblogging.) This is not, incidentally, intended as a knock on The Daily Show, which has a pretty high signal-to-noise ratio for a contemporary television series, but if Jon Stewart is over your head, I submit that you're keeping your head too low.

And here's another link to Lynn. Actually, it's the same link, but if I can get you to click twice, her page views go up twice as fast. It's the least I can do, considering that building traffic these days is like pushing a boulder uphill.

The only Volvo on my Will Consider Next Time list is the smallish C30, and I may have to rethink that in the light of this bit of news:

I assume Mr Herzog's pedal dimensions are expressed in British terms, since the Eurostandard for ginormous clodhoppers calls for numbers in the upper 40s and beyond. That said, a British size 12 is about the same as an American size 12½, which is far from huge. (Says the guy who wears a 14.)

One question remains unanswered: didn't he test drive his Swedish steed?

(Via Autoblog.)

I've decided to give the Carnival of the Vanities its own section on the sidebar, rather than a single entry each week which (1) draws heinous amounts of spammers for some reason and (2) requires me to come up with some cutesy verbiage which exploits the individual Carnival number, which (3) Andrew Ian Dodge isn't using anyway.

In view of this change, and the fact that not everything I do around here is exactly intuitive, consider this an open thread to post your questions about site mechanics, motivations and policies. (Besides, there's a Woot-Off today, so I'm probably not going to write a whole lot of new stuff.)

Never fear. The Irritated Tulsan has the solution:

An example:

Yeah, but what would you interrupt with?

Watch out, YouTube!

With gas pushing four bucks a gallon and maintenance prices out of sight, you, too, may have to abandon your motor vehicle, as did the owner of an early-Nineties Buick at 42nd and Treadmill Tuesday night. If this should happen to you, the following advice may be helpful:

• Do not draw attention to your plight: pull straight into the space, within the lines if at all possible. Taking up one space is considered merely disrespectful: taking up two spaces is heinous.

• Make arrangements to have the vehicle picked up no later than the following morning, before the actual property owners notice.

• If your vehicle is front-wheel-drive, park with the nose out: this will simplify towing, if necessary.
  

The preceding has been brought to you as a public service.

Me, I rather enjoyed the Gazette's take on The Lost Ogle, partly because author Rod Lott apparently talked to actual Ogles at some point, but mostly for Tony's final point:

Seldom are truer words spoken in blogdom.

Still, the piece gave short shrift — scarcely any shrift at all, in fact — to where Tony, Clark Matthews (how come he rates a surname?) and Patrick might be going with this little enterprise of theirs. With that in mind, I'd like to offer a few suggestions:

• Find a picture of Jenni Carlson in a bikini.
  
• And then don't post it.
  
• Drive Jim Traber to tears.
  
• Drive Jim Traber to Saskatchewan.
  
• Put together a petition to nominate Gary England for a Nobel Peace Prize.
  

This should secure their future for the next ten years or ten million page views, whichever comes first.

"What does not kill me," said Nietzsche, "makes me stronger."

If you've been enjoying the Barack Obama blooper reels, you might want to keep this in mind:

Then again, Hillary Clinton may yet boil Obama's bunny.

Once again, the Tulsa World and the Oklahoman are engaged in a pissing match, and, well, urine for it now.

The subject: that Forbes assertion that Oklahoma City was well-nigh "recession-proof." The World dribbled forth the first round:

What advantage is that, you ask?

Oklahoma City is indeed the state capital, and what's more, the huge Tinker Air Force Base complex is here. But Forbes didn't mention government jobs at all: the rating is based entirely on private-sector investment. Otherwise, snips the Oklahoman:

And then things escalate:

Finally, a nearly-QOTW-worthy punchline:

If only it were true. But Tulsa doesn't want to be Oklahoma City; Tulsa wants the sort of status that once came with the "Oil Capital of the World" label, and the ability to look down their collective noses at everyone else, Oklahoma City included. So this isn't envy, exactly: call it nostalgia for a bygone era.

Besides, the World has already given the game away:

Tulsans, however, have largely seen fit to disregard the World's calls for higher taxes, and that, I suspect, annoys the World far more than anything that might be happening down here at the other end of the Turner.

Brad Neese would like to live downtown, he thinks:

So he took last weekend's Downtown Living Tour, and he's posting his findings. (This is the first installment; others have followed.) It doesn't hurt that he's working downtown now, which means that he could live a lot closer to his workplace and pour fewer dollars into the gas tank. (Then again, I used to live within six minutes of 42nd and Treadmill, and you couldn't pay me to move back into that neighborhood.) And let's face it, there's a lot to be said for "novel and cool," especially if it can be attained without having to deal with pesky drivers.

Matt Welch, on the remains of the Clintonistas:

Warning: If you follow that New York Times link in the quote, you will have to wait for literally hundreds of comments to load up.

The struggling CW network will turn over its Sunday prime-time programming to Media Rights Capital, which will produce two new dramas (presumably at 8 and 9 Eastern) and two comedies (presumably at 7 and 7:30).

MRC is run by Mordecai Wiczyk and Asif Satchu: they financed, among other things, the 2007 remake of Sleuth, which was released through Sony Pictures Classics, and the upcoming Sacha Baron Cohen project, which may or may not be called Brüno: Delicious Journeys Through America for the Purpose of Making Heterosexual Males Visibly Uncomfortable in the Presence of a Gay Foreigner in a Mesh T-Shirt.

Legalese and English are often at odds, or so it seems to me, and sometimes we have to sacrifice the language to plug the loopholes.

This is not one of those times. Last month former Sonics owner Howard Schultz filed suit against the current Sonics owners, hoping to get the sale voided.

With this in mind, Wiley L. Williams, assistant municipal counselor in Oklahoma City, shot off a nine-page letter to Schultz's legal team [link goes to PDF file] informing them that whoever owns the team is legally bound by the new Oklahoma City leases. Key (so to speak) phrase (page four):

This grates on the ears in several places, although "whomever they may be" is, I contend, the worst, and the least excusable.