Four Weeks Magazine is — well, let them tell you:

I suppose it would be difficult to make this a print publication, inasmuch as you'd have to send it to a quarter of the subscribers each week.

(Via All Things Jennifer, where this question is posed: "Why?")

This fall Francis Tuttle Technology Center is offering a course in feng shui:

Okay, it may not be as immediately useful as, say, Spanish for Hotel & Restaurant Personnel, but I'm sure the demand is there.

Yet to be determined: if there's a demand for copywriters who don't use "their" as a singular pronoun.

"One Gleeson Plaza" is the new designation for Sean and Phoebe's place, and it has a certain upscale sheen to it, which makes sense since it's only a stone's throw from the fabled Blog Building.

It's an American thing, I think, to want our surroundings to bear pleasant-sounding names, although The Onion is reporting that Chicago is running out:

Oklahoma City is currently processing plats and such for Oakdale Valley, Quail Ridge Estates, Settler's Ridge, Silver Leaf East, Somers Pointe, Country Hollow, Marble Leaf, and Robin Ridge, among others.

Most of these are innocuous, but enough with the "Pointe" business already: "pointe" is a ballet position, not a term of location.

Which, in turn, reminds me of this from five years ago:

Include "Pointe" in said codswallop.

Of course, here at Surlywood, we pay attention, not only to this world, but the next:

Sounds almost like a trip to Vegas, doesn't it? (And what happens there, I understand, really stays there.)

Most of your high-zoot (even medium-zoot) fragrances have wispy yet evocative names: Femme Fatale, Winter Kiss, Midnight Rain. Viktor & Rolf, up there in Amsterdam, decided to keep the evocative and lose the wispy; their scent is called "Flowerbomb," of which Peppermint Patty says:

All that for a measly $95 for 50 ml, a buck ninety for one milliliter, which is only slightly more than ink for my HP DeskJet at work, which goes for $1.84/ml and presumably doesn't smell as good.

V&R now have a scent for men, which bears the curious name "Antidote." I admit to being at least slightly curious, especially since the ineffable Rufus Wainwright has penned a tune for it:

And let's face it, nobody's going to write a song about Old Spice. (Carmina Burana doesn't count.)

I've never written any genre fiction, unless there's a genre called "sucky," but from what I've read, I have to believe that an essential component thereof is an adroit manipulation of cliché: if your characters are stock, they should be at least recognizable stock.

Or maybe not. Major romance fan Tara Marie has some serious questions:

[shudder]

If they lapsed into Latin, you'd suspect them of having a surplice in the closet somewhere.

I had an idea once for a vampire from Georgia (our Georgia, where Atlanta, not Tbilisi, is the capital), complete with (faint) accent, a disdain for monochrome garb, and a fondness for NASCAR. I could not, however, bring myself to call him "Count Dacula."

"Feisty," in my experience, is a substitute for "short": regardless of whatever attitude she may be copping at any particular moment, no one will ever refer to Elle Macpherson as "feisty." In fact, people over five-eight in general are never described as "feisty" unless they play in the National Basketball Association, in which case the cutoff is six-one.

I need hardly point out that this does not at all preclude stupidity.

A few eons ago, Sheri S. Tepper wrote of Mavin Manyshaped, one of a clan of shapeshifters, who, once her powers develop, flees from the family compound, lest she be abused like the other women in the clan. Mavin takes her younger brother with her; to speed the process along, she assumes the shape of a horse.

So far, this is a fairly routine fantasy concept, but Tepper is never routine. If you think about it — obviously she did — the Mavin/horse is going to have to eat, and eat a lot, during a long journey like this, and once she returns to human form, well, what's going to happen to all that bulk she was carrying as an equine?

Exactly. Tepper doesn't dwell on the point, but she doesn't evade it either.

Nor does Lileks sidestep the issue:

Do not expect this wisdom to be reflected in this year's My Little Pony^® product line.

Love, sweet love?

"More dried-up, bitter old post-menopausal hags," says Andrea Harris:

Or, on occasion, the Oprah-approved bogus memoir.

I think, though, this "free to be sluts" business is as much a matter of politics as of philosophy: the only sort of freedom unequivocally endorsed by the left, and therefore by its client subcultures, is sexual freedom. (Which, of course, comes with chains of its own, but that's another issue.)

And I suspect that the endless parade of feebs and fools that crosses the television screen between Good Morning America and World News Tonight is intended, at some level, as a self-esteem booster for the customers, since there is nothing, after all, more important than self-esteem, and even the least-favored of us can feel superior to that sorry lot. It's Socrates updated: the unexamined life is a source of entertainment.

Okay, one white iPod. Here's the pitch:

What he decided he wanted: Dreamworks SKG, which was acquired by Viacom recently for $1.6 billion.

Me, I think he's gonna have to adjust his goal slightly to allow for the been-there-done-that factor. I hear Facebook's for sale.

(Via Defamer.)

Composer Charles Gounod once said: "Mozart exists, and will exist, eternally; divine Mozart — less a name, more a soul descending to us from the heavens, who appeared on this earth, stayed for a little over thirty years, and left it all the more rejuvenated, richer and happier for his appearance."

If anything, Gounod was underestimating him. The independent film Mozartballs, named for the popular Salzburg confection, makes the case that Mozart's influence, the power of his music, the resilience of his spirit, is undiminished today, 250 years after his birth.

This film focuses on five individuals whose lives are literally transformed by that power: a retired schoolteacher in Switzerland, once despondent, now rescued; a composer who uses the original music to create new works in the same spirit (sort of "Amadeus ex machina," if you will); the first Austrian space traveler, for whom the music provided connections to both earth and sky; and a couple in Oklahoma who have found that spirit dwelling deep within themselves.

Or, in other words, Mozart lives! (Which, I discover, was a working title for the film.) If you've ever doubted it for a moment, Mozartballs will persuade you otherwise.

The US premiere was late last night at the Okie Blogger Roundup; being old and infirm, I was unable to attend — they buried poor Wolfgang at thirty-five, and I'm pushing fifty-three, fercryingoutloud — but Steph Waller was kind enough to set me up with a DVD of the current 56-minute version, for which I am grateful. This fall, an expanded cut (70 minutes or so) will be issued on DVD. It's worth your time just for the music — it's Mozart, after all — but the story is so compelling that you, too, may be touched by the spirit of the man from Salzburg.

(Playing while this post was written: Piano Concerto No. 17 in G major, K. 453, John O'Conor, Scottish Chamber Orchestra/Sir Charles Mackerras.)

Perhaps I'm too old to have been creeped out by the 1970s Screen Gems logo known familiarly as the S from Hell: it's an irritating little tune, but not particularly scary, though the Eye of Baal, or whatever the heck that is in the center, is genuinely off-putting.

The sound that freaked me as a kid, and still raises measurable amounts of gooseflesh, is Jack Webb's Mark VII Limited logo, the clang of the hammer so loud it actually hurt. (The link is to a more recent version, mostly because it sounds better, if "better" can apply here.) The one thing that saved me from certain aural trauma was the fact that they usually cut right away to the logo for Revue Studios and/or MCA Television Distribution, which provided an escape from the anvil chorus in my brain. (Sample here; this is at an odd bit rate and may not play on every machine known to man.)

Ernest Hemingway, it is said, once came up with a short story — a good one, yet — that ran all of six words: "For sale: baby shoes, never worn." As nanofiction goes, if it's not the standard-bearer, it's pretty darn close: how much of a tale can you tell in half a dozen words? There's "In the beginning was the Word," same length, but not what I think of as fiction.

Caterina Fake is collecting samples from her readers. Here are some I particularly liked:

They do seem to be somewhat sad, don't they?

(The best short story I ever wrote took a whole 804 words.)

Terry Teachout's Cultural Convergence Index is simple enough, yet fiendishly complex: there's no obvious, or even concealed, pattern to it. As the man himself explains:

Sometimes, we like things because, well, we like them, without regard to whether it fits into some particular school or tradition or era or whatever. The true value of the Teachout Index, I'd say, is that it reminds us of this fact without having to slap us in the face with a damp carp.

John Salmon of Mystic Chords tried his hand at the Index today, which is what prompted this post.

And if you're wondering if I were going to do this, you're about twenty-seven months behind: see Vent #397 for my own results. (I agreed with Teachout roughly half the time.)

I've never been to the Marshall County (Tennessee) Memorial Library, but I'm willing to bet that they've got some books on the shelves (in the 400s if they use Dewey Decimal) in rather a lot of languages besides English.

God forbid the locals should find out:

I am sorely tempted to go buy a non-English book and have it delivered to the library (310 Farmington Pike, Lewisburg, Tennessee 37091) just out of spite. The Annoyed Librarian might approve:

Maybe a novel by Gabriel García Márquez. That ought to shake them up a tad.

By some standards, I (or my lovely doppelgänger, about whom too much has been said already) achieved Fixture status in the local BBS scene in the middle-to-late 1980s. However, it must be said that while there were plenty of users in my chronological cohort, most of the headlines were inevitably made by, so to speak, punks half my age.

Except for Jack Flack, who was one-third my age.

Flack's memoir Commodork: Sordid Tales from a BBS Junkie, published under his ostensibly-"real" name of Rob O'Hara, is now out and about, and it's about as unfiltered a history of this era as I'm ever likely to see: yes, there were some, um, illicit activities going on, and O'Hara knows copyfests and krackage as well as anyone in this time zone. Today, of course, is (sorta) different:

And woe betide he who pronounces that last word as though it were a city in Mexico.

(Find Commodork at lulu.com. And do read this: it's an overview of that very subculture, written by Flack himself.)

Springtime in New York: what better time for romance? It's about time, thinks Haley Walker, and you can't blame her: a few years back she and daughter Vera fled Austin, Texas and "psychotic" husband Roger, with little more than the shirts on their backs — and about six hundred pairs of designer shoes.

Haley has done fairly well for herself. Upon her arrival in the Big Apple, she waited tables at a restaurant, which turned out to be a front for a money-laundering operation for Romanian mobsters; when the ringleader was tossed into the slammer, she was the only person on staff who had any idea of how actual restaurants were supposed to work, and by default she became the manager. Now the restaurant's a success, the daughter's turned thirteen, and maybe, just maybe, it's time to dip one Jimmy Choo-clad toe into the dating pool once more.

This is the setup for Theresa Rebeck's Bad Dates, the season opener for the Oklahoma City Repertory Theatre, and in true CityRep tradition, they're working without a net: Bad Dates is a 95-minute monologue, the musings of Haley Walker in her Manhattan bedroom as she reflects on the perfidy of men, the mythos of Mildred Pierce, and the value of quality footwear. And the dates? Bad, bad, and finally, at long last, worse.

The genius of this particular play, I think, is establishing Haley as an expat Texan, as fiercely independent as any native New Yorker, but maybe too wistful to immerse herself in that legendary Manhattan cynicism. It also makes an already difficult role more so, since at any given moment there are two or three or more emotions being juggled and only one person to convey them all. And in this production, that one person is Oklahoma City native Stacey Logan, who's spent enough time on the Broadway boards to know where the Southwest and the Big Apple intersect, and whose timing is Borscht Belt-perfect. Logan's Haley is utterly believable: you share her excitement when she goes out, and her disappointment when she recounts the horrible story of what happened when she did. (Pacing is critical here, but director Michael Jones maintains a steady hand.) And remember that jailed Romanian mobster? He's not going to stay in stir forever.

It's hard for me to talk about Bad Dates, simply because I've been someone's Bad Date more than once (and someone's psychotic husband once). But I laughed out loud at the funny stuff, of which there is an abundance, and I was moved by the suddenly-scary events of the second act. The crowd this afternoon was smallish — something about a football game, they tell me — but appreciative. And you've got until the 22nd to see it yourself.

I admit to being a sucker for off-kilter love stories — even off-kilter teenage love stories, if they're done with some degree of finesse. Laura Whitcomb's A Certain Slant of Light has so much finesse it nearly slipped away from me, but I was able to maintain some semblance of a grip right up until the only possible ending that made any sense.

"Someone was looking at me, a disturbing sensation if you're dead." And so she was, her own life having run out a century before, bound to a succession of "hosts" who are never aware of her existence, final disposition of her case evidently still pending. While looking after "her" English teacher, she's somehow seen by one of his students, and she must find out more.

He, like her, is Light, assigned to this in-between world. Yet he somehow has a body:

This seemed more plausible to me than I thought it would. And eventually the want overwhelms the rules, and she finds an "empty" body of her own:

Two people, both long dead, now pretending to be the teenagers whose bodies they inhabit. It's not hard to see where this is going, but it's difficult not to feel something for them, so long deprived — or for the departed youngsters who had no idea what they were giving up. It's a fascinating story, more than a little bit creepy in spots, and, I'd say, worth the extra effort it demands of the "young-adult" audience to whom it's pitched. How did I wind up with this book? I wish I knew.

And I want to order these:

• 0.7 Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest
  
• Slaughterhouse-3.5
  
• The 4.9 Habits of Highly Effective People
  
• Catch-15.4
  
• The Crying of Lot 34.3
  
• Around the World in 56 Days
  
• 58.8 Charing Cross Road
  
• Fahrenheit 315.7
  
• 1400.7: A Space Odyssey
  
• 14,000 Leagues Under the Sea
  
• Seven Hundred Thousand Little Pieces
  

(Via Gawker.)

Allison Glock goes costume-shopping and is dismayed at what she finds:

I suspect, however, that part of her annoyance lies elsewhere:

"Sure, degrade men as well. That's the ticket," sniffs Mona Charen.

Still, whatever the grownups must endure on the last night of October pales in comparison to the truly crappy stuff inflicted on the kids.

KFC thinks its founder ought to be on a postage stamp:

Younger folks may be forgiven if they look at the cartoon portrayal of the Colonel in recent TV spots and sniff, "Real person? Yeah, right." But Harland Sanders was very real, and by all accounts extra crispy: after selling off his company, he complained that the post-Sanders mashed potatoes and gravy were "wallpaper paste" covered with "sludge", prompting the new owners to sue him for maligning the product. Of course, I have always believed that biting the hand that feeds you is one of the four basic food groups.

No, not here. I mean that apparently I haven't kept up with the Zeitgeist worth a darn.

Lisa Schwarzbaum's review of Marie Antoinette (in Entertainment Weekly) contains this curious sentence:

Emphasis added. Now what the heck does that phrase mean? I'll grant that Sofia Coppola is a filmmaker, and that she's matured, and I don't doubt her capacity to create a "new cinematic vocabulary," but I'm not quite sure where the transition from post-feminism to post-post-feminism occurred, or if it has anything to do with so-called "third-wave" feminism. If I've counted this up correctly, Coppola, says Schwarzbaum, seems to be ushering in the fourth (maybe the fifth) wave.

Not that there's anything wrong with that, particularly, though when I think of cultural harbingers, Kirsten Dunst in a big wig isn't the first image that comes to mind.

Andrea Harris, on the Chubbening of America:

We are become our own cities: we grow outward rather than upward. I see more seven-footers than I used to, but this is because we now have an NBA team on loan. (And actually, Tyson Chandler is the only one who checks in at 84 inches or above.)

Maybe it's just that people who once never dared venture out of the house, for fear of public mockery, have grown a spine. Not that I'd want to look for it, particularly.

But then:

The secret, I suspect, died with Dr Atkins. And really, I don't know any fat vegetarians, carbs notwithstanding. Perhaps not even they could stand to eat that many greens.

If you ask me, the entire philosophy of the animal-rights movement boils down (45 minutes at high heat, add many grains of salt) to "Animals, unlike men, do not wage war," granting the critters the sort of moral standing they would never bestow upon humans — except, of course, themselves. It is, of course, possible, even desirable, to extend kindness to animals, though we should never delude ourselves that we and they can live in perfect harmony so long as no one ever goes to Burger King. And rapidly moving up my Fondest Dreams chart is a vision of Peter Singer being eaten by shrews.

The idea of leftist groups getting odd, of course, is about as remarkable as the idea of Seattle getting rain.

Danielle Steel now has her own signature fragrance, called, sanely enough, "Danielle," which will be marketed by Elizabeth Arden through the usual outlets.

The Internet Writing Journal blog thinks this is a great idea, and that other writers should do likewise: "It" by Stephen King, say, or Neil Gaiman's "Shadow."

I anxiously await two Dr. Seuss scents — "Green Eggs" and "Ham" — and shudder at the thought of what they might come up with for Gabriel García Márquez: "Solitude"? "Time of Cholera"?

(Via Brenda Coulter at Romancing the Blog.)

Seen (presumably) in North Vancouver, British Columbia:

(Via boinky.)

So I catch sight of this book cover — the book itself is out in November — and my second thought (my first thought, inevitably, is "Hmmm, nice legs") is "What are the chances that this author has Minnesota roots?" The answer, as it turns out, is 100 percent, though there's still one nagging question: Does the spelling of "hot dish" as two words, something one simply does not do in Minnesota, have any particular significance, or is this just some New York publishing weasel's misapplication of the term? (Yeah, I know: buy the darn book.)

And they didn't get one, either:

Back in the day when General Motors was struggling to keep its market share below 50 percent, dentists and lawyers and such, even if they could afford Cadillacs, tended to buy Buicks and Oldsmobiles, lest their clientele wonder if maybe they might be getting overcharged. The idea that there's historical precedent for this sort of modesty is just this side of fascinating.

This is not to say, though, that the dentists weren't protective of what was theirs:

It could have been worse: the curse could have included root-canal work.

(Stolen from Scribal Terror.)

Well, okay, no, he wasn't really. But there's one parked outside his house.

(Probably not a LaSalle, though. Via Pop Culture Junk Mail.)

Ex-Rocketboom host Amanda Congdon has landed on her flexible feet: she's signed a development deal with HBO and will be making broadcast and Web appearances on ABC.

On t'other hand, Joanne Colan has come into her own as the face of Rocketboom, and she's bound to be just as much of a household word eventually.

Even though they've been legal for two and a half weeks now, I have not felt compelled to run out and get a tattoo; while under certain circumstances they can be attractive — there's a nice little ankh-like design near one ankle on the second-nicest pair of legs I've ever seen — there's still something a trifle off-putting about the whole concept.

Steph Waller, as usual, puts it more aptly:

And on me, regardless of color, it would create the image that the Goodyear Blimp is subletting advertising space.

One of the lifers here (nearly 20 years) at 42nd and Treadmill is considered, mostly by default, to be the expert on Hot Guys, and I made a point of staying out of Casino Royale until she pronounced her verdict on Daniel Craig, especially since I had expressed minor reservations about the fellow. (I tend to trust her judgment on men, since she's never shown the slightest interest in me.)

Not to worry, she assures me; at some point they sprayed him down with Wuss-B-Gone, and he comes off as credible, and credibly studly, an important characteristic for Double-O operatives.

Which, of course, got me thinking: M, these days, is a woman (Dame Judi Dench). And I don't claim to understand all of the M.O. over at Universal Exports, but it seems only logical to me that one does not become M without serious field experience. So at some point there may have been a Bond — Jane Bond.

With this in mind, I point you to this AfterEllen compilation of ideas for a female Bond, largely from a lesbian point of view; after all, at least part of the appeal of the series has been the steady procession of "Bond girls." (Via Swirlspice.)

And with none of this in mind, Eric Siegmund reviews Casino Royale.

Just received from the subscription-fulfillment house:

No, you were right the first time: my last issue of Harper's Magazine has just been mailed to me.

The decision was made some months ago when literary editor Ben Metcalf went into paroxysms over the sheer delight of strangling George W. Bush with his bare hands. Even Lewis H. Lapham, who wrote a piece about what he'd heard at the 2004 Republican National Convention before the convention actually took place, never sank to this level.

Mother Jones (another lefty magazine to which I subscribe) doesn't pull crap like that. Yes, they're over the top now and then — I expect that from a publication with a political bent, and the angle of the bend doesn't matter — but they're not in the habit of going out of their way to be stupidly offensive. If I need literary criticism, I can read the Atlantic; if I need fatuous explanations of why Bush! Is! Evil!, I can read Vanity Fair. (I've discovered, incidentally, that V.F. is improved markedly if you rip out Wolcott's pages beforehand.)

So Harper's is gone after the next issue. I figure they've survived for 156 years; they don't need my twenty bucks, or whatever fire-sale price they're offering. (Single copies are a startling $6.95.) Maybe I'll use it to renew Stuff.

Young doctors, claims a Miami physician in The New York Times, are dressing inappropriately:

Well, okay. Dr Pamela A Rowland, director of the Office of Professional Development at Dartmouth Medical School, says that it can also affect the outcome of oral exams for board certification:

As a rule, I shy away from That Which Is Medical, and therefore I have little anecdotal evidence to cite here, though I did once (okay, more than once) avail myself of the services of a dentist who seemed to fulfill the Texas Babe stereotype: slender and rangy, moderately-big blonde hair, endless legs. However, it must be pointed out that, at the office anyway, she dressed more like Lubbock than Dallas — no effort to be trendy — and she didn't go out of her way to dazzle you with any of that Dr McLusciousness stuff.

Meanwhile, Lindsay Beyerstein has her doubts:

And indeed, the Times illustration reeks of stockphotohood; I don't know any physicians who look like that, and if I did, the first thing I'd want to know is "Is she in our network?"

Stirring new storyline, or desperate grab for viewers? You make the call:

The only transitioning character I can remember seeing on series television was Cindy McCauliff, played by Lisa Edelstein early in the fourth season of Ally McBeal. She was far enough along in transition to refuse to take a corporate physical, got fired for it, and is suing the employer. In the midst of things, she and attorney Mark Albert (James LeGros) wind up dating — he's not working on her case, so he doesn't know, and no one is in a rush to tell him — and the unveiling, as it were, is not pretty:

Odd that I should remember this. Or maybe not so odd; Edelstein, as I recall, was kinda hot. And the writers botched this badly: early in the first episode of the arc, Cindy admits to being a "man," which I can't believe any self-respecting M2F would say out loud.

I suspect AMC will handle this, so to speak, with no greater sensitivity. Not that I'm a big fan of sensitivity or anything.

Lileks speculates on what happened to the Peanuts gang:

Given the lifespan of dogs in general, you have to assume that Snoopy shuffled off this mortal collar years ago; still, I see him and the Baron hoisting a couple of root beers in the Great Repository of War Clichés in the Sky. (For the holidays, of course.)

There may have been four thousand holes in Blackburn, Lancashire, but there are forty million leaves in Montclair, New Jersey.

David Hasselhoff, Roger DeBris is you:

Didn't we meet him on a summer cruise?

(Via Lawren.)

While I have been known to do unspeakable things like defend Thomas Kinkade, I'll be the first person to tell you that sometimes it's the function of art to shake you up a bit. (I attended, for instance, this exhibit, and wrote about it here.)

"Shake you up a bit," though, stops well short of what Jennifer went through:

This was, I believe, the desired effect. From a promotional page for the same artist, and possibly even the same exhibit:

Jennifer recalls:

A little of that, I submit, goes a long, long way.

The artist in question, apparently, is the visual equivalent of Jandek, a few of whose recordings I have heard over the years, despite warnings from Irwin Chusid, who says things like this about him:

And yet Jandek has made forty-eight albums at this writing. (Corwood Industries, Jandek's record label, is normal in one respect, anyway: they started numbering with "0739".)

There is, I conclude, a market for this sort of thing. The Muses, I assume, have their off-days, or a fairly warped sense of humor — or, conceivably, all of the above.

Dawn Eden talks to the Washington Times, and there are ... rather a lot of ... apparent ... gaps.

Since she isn't disowning the Times interview, I assume that the points she made were not affected by the nefarious practice of Dowdification.

A few days back I put up a brief piece about this year's Bad Sex in Fiction award.

It occurs to me, or at least to someone, that the award might actually be superfluous, because "all sex scenes are gratuitous":

Such a tease, that Lois.

But the real reason that they're extraneous is that they never seem to have anything new to say:

Human anatomy, after all, is pretty well standardized. Once upon a time the characters were portrayed as breaking the laws of North Podunk; today they're portrayed as breaking the laws of physics.

(Which, of course, may explain why Lois Lane and Superman ... um, never mind.)

Something I quoted from Premiere's Libby Gelman-Waxner:

Perhaps Libby was more prescient than she thought:

Well, you have to figure that Armageddon isn't going to start in Indianapolis, but apart from that, what's wrong with this picture?

I hope Ms Gelman-Waxner collects at least a "Suggested by" credit.

If you want someone to remember what you said, throw in a friggin' vulgarism or three:

(Via Steph Mineart, who says "No shit. I've said this for years.")

Lileks, on the Pillsbury Doughboy:

This narrative skips over the fact that there was once a Doughgirl at his side, to greet him with a smile, to comfort him when the croissants wound up curved in the wrong direction. But she disappeared almost as quickly as she had appeared, which would no doubt explain his sorrow, his desolation. Nobody ever explained what had happened to her: had a defective can caused her to explode? Did something from the oven prove to be her undoing? Was it something as simple as a yeast infection?

To this day, no one at Pillsbury is saying.

In the Agora's Eric Seymour, noting some slightly fleshy pop-ups (so to speak) at Reason's Web site, asks if maybe the libertarian magazine is planning a swimsuit issue.

Me, I'm not particularly interested — unless they're planning to bring back Virginia Postrel.

(Title inspired by this Scribal Terror post.)

But don't call them bodice-ripping. Brenda Coulter reveals that a lot more guys are reading those love stories than you might think:

I admit to having read a few of them. (Fewer than thirty, anyway.) And I approach them just about the same way I approach science-fiction stories: I assume that I will be thrust into an environment with which I am wholly unfamiliar. The difference, of course, is that I studied science when I was younger, and mostly enjoyed it.

A reminder from Syaffolee:

Star Wars, you'll remember, was a Western.

Since these won't be getting much in the way of network promotion, I figured I'd get in a plug or two here for these worthy seasonal offerings:

As always, check your local listings.

Maybe no one else does this, but when I'm reading a book and I come across a paragraph I particularly like, I'll pause, take a breath, and then read it again out loud, just to savor the sound and revel in its resonance.

And it's been years since I did that as many times as I did in Frank Portman's King Dork, which I finally got around to reading this weekend, and which reminded me on every page how grateful I am to be thirty or forty years away from high school.

I'd be hard-pressed to name a favorite paragraph in the book, but I read this one twice:

Not even Gagdad Bob could say it better, or more efficiently. I find myself now yearning for the audiobook version, and I hate audiobooks. I am forced to conclude that Frank Portman is at least as much a genius as Sam Hellerman.

Once again I tap Lileks for my opening:

The shock of recognition hit me toward the end of the paragraph, for the most obvious of reasons: I've been there. I spent half a week in North Dakota during World Tour '04, and at least an hour of that time I spent combing through the Fargo Library, because it was there and because it looked interesting. I had, of course, no idea that it was Marked for Death.

The current Fargo library will close its doors for the last time Saturday. The city is spending serious money on Books 'N Stuff; a new storefront branch opened this past summer on the city's north side, and the storefront branch on the south side will be replaced by a new facility next year. As for the downtown library, it will be given a shot of explosives and will be replaced by something different. Maybe better, though Lileks isn't sure:

We did okay here in Oklahoma City when we replaced our old Stern Institutional Facility with this neat place. And now I have an excuse to go back to North Dakota some day.

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

Wake me up around the middle of September.

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

(Story seen at Fark.com.)

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

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

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

And God forbid women should read this stuff:

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

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

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

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

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

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

(Via Zack Wendling.)

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

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

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

To which Nyhan responds:

Short answer: yes.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Well, okay, maybe not the whole family: there's a bit or two of salty language.

DysEnchanted is a six-minute short (plus, inevitably, two minutes of credits) by Terri Edda Miller, in which various storybook heroines — you know them all — are at their weekly group-therapy meeting. This could have been extremely silly in the wrong hands, but Miller keeps the silliness dialed down while making the characters fit together well. I liked it well enough to hunt it down on DVD.

There's a Web site, and for the moment at least, it can be caught at YouTube, with an occasional blip. (I saw it at Nina's place.)

It is a measure of things that Jessica can describe America "Ugly Betty" Ferrara as "curvy" and then feel compelled to explain the term:

I mention in passing that my best subject in secondary school was geometry.

Said debut film, incidentally, was not, in fact, The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants.

"Don't ask me to find the topic sentence in a paragraph containing two or more sentences," says novelist Brenda Coulter, and she means it:

I'm thinking a mixture of (1) and (2), inasmuch as Mrs Muckenfuss (may she rest in peace) would taunt me from the Grammar Netherworld for suggesting anything like (3).

Of course, one can always avoid Topic Sentences by doing single-sentence paragraphs, but this is a technique used mostly by untalented hacks.

(See?)

Breast cancer, nasty stuff that it is, has rounded up its forces for one more surge at the expense of Texas journalist Molly Ivins, who's back in the hospital again.

This is the third recurrence of the disease for the 62-year-old Ivins, who suggested the "Still Not Dead" title to Editor and Publisher last year. Brother Andy says she's "tough as a metal boot," and I hope she has the strength to kick her way out of this.

(Via Lindsay Beyerstein.)

Karl Mechem's The Journal of Short Film is a quarterly DVD (ten bucks, $36 a year) that features worthy short films you probably won't see otherwise. This year there's a roadshow of sorts, and Mechem himself was on hand at OKCMOA's Noble Theater to introduce two collections of shorts featured in the Journal; I caught the second one today.

Steven Bognar's Gravel is a stunningly beautiful, if rambling, tale of a social worker who's fallen for an ex-con who used to be one of her clients, and her better-grounded teenaged daughter. It goes nowhere in particular but is seriously involving just the same.

Brian Liloia's ¡Sí, Se Puede! looks at two Mexican brothers who have left their homeland and their families behind to seek work in the States, and argues, with varying degrees of subtlety, the case for open borders: certainly you wouldn't want to see these two fellows, who want only to work and help their familes, sent home.

Chel White's Dirt is a fast and funny tale, part Jean Cocteau, part Joe Frank, about a man who grew up eating the very substance of the earth and now is become his own self-contained biosystem. (The Joe Frank-like voiceover is supplied by, yes, Joe Frank.)

Peter Sillen's Grand Luncheonette deplores the Disneyfication of Times Square — and, by extension, the world — by looking at a decidedly non-chain hot-dog stand which had survived for nearly six decades but which was finally put to death by the ostensible "upgrade" of the neighborhood.

Deron Albright's The Legend of Black Tom is the only-slightly-fictionalized story of Tom Molineaux, a slave in early-19th-century America who wins his freedom as a bare-knuckle boxer and who is brought to England to take on the champ. Said champ successfully defends his title, but apparently the fix was in from the very first round. Albright shot this one in live-action and then composited it into what he calls "a woodcut with a watercolor wash," giving it the look of charcoal animation. The voiceover, in verse, is every bit as compelling as the visuals.

Josh Hyde's Chiclé is a tale of two Peruvian brothers, the younger struggling to stay on the path of righteousness, the older seemingly already lost. Pablo, who earns a few soles for the family by selling chewing gum (hence the title) on the streets, gives up his stake for the next day to help a lost American girl, language differences notwithstanding; he does not know that his brother has already complicated matters.

Finally, Borja Cobeaga's Éramos Pocos, which is nominated for an Academy Award for Best Short Film-Live Action, posits a quandary for a man and his son: what will they do, now that the woman of the house has gone? The answer: retrieve her mother from the retirement home. Easy enough — maybe. A splendid example of comic timing.

The folks behind the deadCENTER Film Festival helped bring this series to town, perhaps reasoning that getting more people interested in short films will bring more people to their June event. Good call, say I.

We've now gotten to the point where seemingly everyone on earth is Google-able, and we don't think anything of it until we discover someone who isn't — and that goes double if it seems like that someone really ought to be. This past weekend's project was the transfer from LP to CD of an album by Betty Carlton. And who exactly is Betty Carlton? Here's what the liner notes said:

Betty Carlton, Oklahoma's Poet, was born in Ada, Oklahoma and attended East Central University. She is widely known throughout the Southwest for her prize-winning poetry. Her latest award was a national contest in which her entry, "Gramarye," won first place in [a] field of over 5,000 entries.

She has been nominated for the Poet Laureateship of the State of Oklahoma.

She is the first woman ever to teach in an all-male prison in the Oklahoma Correctional System. Her successful creative writing class has opened doors for other women to teach in all-male prisons in the stste.

She is a legal expert on drugs and does extensive rehabilitative work with women alcoholics and drug addicts.

Her poetry ranges from street poetry to mysticism, making it possible for any audience to identify with and enthusiastically welcome her performances.

She is a member of the Oklahoma Poetry Society, the National Federation of State Poetry Societies, and is listed in the International Who's Who in Poetry in London, England.

The album, titled Moxie, was cut in 1976 for the Val-West label in Albuquerque. (The illustration above is the Star of Ishtar by Shirley White, which serves as cover art.) I couldn't tell you how many copies were pressed — a hundred, maybe? — but apparently only two are known to survive, and one of them was brought to me for transfer. "Gramarye," one assumes, is her Greatest Hit — these days, we spell the word "Grimoire" — and it leans hard against the "mysticism" edge of her range; rather than transcribe it here, I'll let you hear it for yourself.

And maybe, just maybe, someone will remember, and will fill in some of the blanks.

The late Molly Ivins was the editor of the Texas Observer for six years, and for now they're devoting the front page of their Web site to her memory.

I remember this passage — it was in her last Observer before moving to The New York Times — and it still sounds wonderful:

And people will remember Molly, with a smile the size of Texas.

Last year I made up a list of "Phrases I never want to hear again," and prominent on that list — to the extent that it was the only item that drew a reproach in comments, anyway — was this:

In the wake of Vickie's demise (that was her real name, and I always liked it better anyway), I have decided to append a note about it to that post. (Unlike some denizens of blogdom, I have never suffered from the delusion that I could cover my tracks.)

Meanwhile, were I inclined to do one of my infamous pop-culture sendoffs — and believe me, if I couldn't come up with something heartfelt for Frankie Laine, I surely wouldn't be able to say anything about Ms Smith — I'd be better served just ripping off this item from Tam:

I'm readying a New York strip for the grill this evening.

Are there social strata in blogdom? Neil Kramer goes to the heart of the matter:

I don't think so. I have only the vaguest idea what most of my friends make, and don't give much of a damn one way or another.

Of course, I don't know anyone (1) living on the streets or (2) building a second mansion, either.

In 1884, when women first competed at Wimbledon, the top prize was a silver flower basket worth 20 guineas (£21). The top prize for men was worth 30 guineas, and it was gold.

This disparity continued through 2006, when men’s champion Roger Federer received $1.170 million and women’s winner Amelie Mauresmo got $1.117 million. Beginning this year, though, the All England Club has agreed to offer the same prizes to men and women competing at Wimbledon. Club chairman Tim Phillips' announcement:

Last year, Phillips had said:

I note that the women's two-out-of-three, of late, has been at least as big a draw as the men's three-out-of-five.

The 2007 Championships will be held 25 June through 8 July; the exact amount of prize money has not yet been determined.

The story goes that a neophyte show-dog exhibitor somewhere on the West Coast was utterly horrified when the judge casually referred to her little furry darling as a "bitch": how could she say such a cruel thing?

Which may or may not have anything to do with the grumbling over the Seattle pet boutique known as "High Maintenance Bitch".

I suppose it's probably a good thing that HMB doesn't have a big sign out front pushing its line of cat products.

(Via Fark.)

How in the world did NBC end up operating a Web site called HornyManatee.com?

It happened just like this.

The Oklahoman's Tricia Pemberton's daughters discover the Hula Hoop at Wal-Mart:

Emmitt was a little off on his chronology — Wham-O (still the greatest corporate name in history) began selling the round plastic doomaflatchie in 1958 — but I suspect he understood its world-changing nature.

Unlike, for instance, the doofus board of Hudsucker Industries:

Geez. Even Alvin wanted one of them, and he was a farging chipmunk.

One other thing: Wham-O's original hoop, forty-nine years ago, sold for a buck ninety-eight. Adjusted for inflation, this should be $13.92 today. And they say Wal-Mart is bad for us.

"You could kill him on the train,
You could kill him on a plane.
You could kill him here or there,
You could kill him anywhere!"

Sorry. It's impossible not to think in these terms when you're dealing with this recent revelation:

Bartholomew Cubbins knew all this, of course, but he kept it under his hat.

(Via Bill Peschel.)

Dawn Eden traces it back to the spring of 1957. And she's posted a Beverage Alert, which strikes me as eminently sensible.

Your assignment: to rid the Emerald Isle of snakes. Who will do the better job for you: St. Patrick, who has divine intervention somewhere in his portfolio, or Samuel L. Jackson, who operates on sheer mothersomething fury?

We may never know for sure. But if you complete the exercise, treat yourself to a green beer — and a Quarter Pounder with cheese.

(From the files of Miss Cellania.)