The cover of Mad #513, on sale Real Soon Now:

Bonus points if you can explain the title.

(The Idiotical.com is the Mad blog.)

An excerpt from the Wikipedia bio of photographer Raphael Mazzucco:

In 2011 he played himself in the August 28 Season 8 episode entitled “The Big Bang” (Episode 94 of the series) of Entourage where the series main character Vincent Chase was being shot for the cover of a magazine. The scene features a coffee table book by Sean Combs and Jimmy Iovine called Culo.

This might not matter so much except for this one thing: it’s an actual book. “Culo” probably needs no translation, but just in case, here’s a quote from Mazzucco himself:

“The conversation about creating a book of asses is not your garden-variety cocktail party fare.”

The obligatory trailer music video for the book is viewable if you are Of Age or willing to fib to YouTube.

While I might want to snicker at the idea of a pricey coffee-table book dedicated to a single body part, in good conscience I’d also have to note the existence, aided and abetted by Donna Karan, of a 1997 book called Leg, which I actually bought, so my argument is invalid.

Four million people live in Harris County, Texas, which might be enough to explain why some of them have names like Heavenleigh Flores and Shi’tia [sic] Alford and Patronne Dextrexxe Brooks.

Still, this is my (non-Houstonian) candidate for Name of the Year:

This is the slightly-glurgy story behind the screen image.

I managed to go two years without a premium increase, and I figured that this happy situation couldn’t last. It didn’t. On the other hand, the actual bump is less than four percent — the insurance provider on my house should learn from this — and as is my wont, I’m providing a breakdown:

• Liability (injury): up $14.60.
• Liability (property): up $4.10.
• Uninsured motorists: up $4.10.
• Comprehensive: up $0.50.
• Collision: down $11.10.
• Road service: up $5.00.
• Rental reimbursement: up $6.70.

Available discounts were increased by a buck. Total coverages remain unchanged.

If the next question is “Why are you carrying collision on an 11-year-old car on which you owe no money?” the answer is simply that if this thing gets banged up beyond repair, I’ll need the proceeds for a down payment on the next ride. And dropping it would save me less than $20 a month.

Gerard Van der Leun, having been granted, if not a new lease on life, certainly a much-desired renewal, is finding that it is not so easy to adjust to a pace he finds unremittingly slow:

It is only in the last few weeks that the virtue of patience is beginning to dawn on me. That virtue is, “If you are patient with yourself, you may live. If you insist on running the 4 minute mile this afternoon, you will be checked out of here in a wicker basket.” In short, “patience” is no longer an option but a requirement. My previous reaction to illness has been to get over it and then get back to work. No such option here.

Roger Bannister, who knows something about the 4 minute mile, had this to say:

“Doctors and scientists said that breaking the four-minute mile was impossible, that one would die in the attempt. Thus, when I got up from the track after collapsing at the finish line, I figured I was dead.”

Sir Roger has thus far survived 57 years since that incident. But the best advice so far seems to have come from Ric Locke in Gerard’s comment section:

What you have to do is give over optimism, at least the sort of bumptious, forceful optimism that demands that the next thing be better. That’s how the OWS kiddies got where they are. No matter how well things turn out there’s always something not quite perfect, so they get disappointed and either bitter or furious, depending on personality. The true pessimist, on the other hand, goes through life with a spring in his step and a smile on his face; nothing happens that’s worse than expected, and all his surprises are happy ones.

After not being killed by the strongest earthquake in Oklahoma history Saturday night, I find this advice most useful.

A handy tip before the Apocalypse:

(Seen, obviously, at FAIL Blog’s WIN!)

So this year I decided: rather than have the goblins come to me, I will go to the goblins. Two adjacent neighborhoods took over the business end of Smitty Park in the late afternoon and filled it up with all sorts of things to attract the younger set, up to and including a bounce house, and by the time I showed up — pushing sixish — the place was wall-to-wall kids. (“And they weren’t even on my lawn,” sighed the empty-nester.) I dropped my supply of goodies into the community bowl and watched as mischievousness was channeled into something almost controllable. My one moment of alarm came when several dozen rolls of toilet paper were produced for an event I hadn’t seen on the agenda: the youngsters were going to TP each other. “Wrap Your Mummy,” it was dubbed. Some of these kids have a future sealing packages at UPS.

Neighborhood Association officials pronounced themselves pleased with the turnout, and things started to run down at sundown. There’s a lot to be said for being halfway between downtown and the ‘burbs.

For those of you who were wondering what Rebecca Black was up to this past week:

Saturday she dropped in at Variety’s Power of Youth event, presented by the Hub.

Sunday (which comes afterwards) she put out a call via the usual social media for extras to appear in the video for “Person of Interest,” presumably the single from the new album, due out Real Soon Now. The shoot started Monday and apparently finished Tuesday.

And at some point (13:19 in), Jack Black admitted to Diablo Cody that he’s never heard of Rebecca Black. (Then again, I’m reasonably certain I’d admit almost anything to Diablo Cody.)

Finally, if you’re contemplating trick-or-treating as Rebecca Black, here are some helpful hints. Be sure to have fun, fun, fun, fun.

Bonus: Fillyjonk turned up a My Little Pony setting of “Friday,” marked by a certain, um, Rarity.

In an effort to get ahead of the curve, I’m putting up a few not-entirely-random factoids about the Republic of Vanuatu, before Robert Stacy McCain takes over as the United States Ambassador thereto.

• The US has no embassy in Vanuatu: diplomatic affairs are handled through the embassy in Papua New Guinea.
• The Vanuatu Tourism Office has a Web site at vanuatu.travel, which means that someone actually paid for a .travel domain.
• “As an island nation, Vanuatu is relatively free from major pest and diseases that are found in other countries. It is of vital importance to maintain this relatively pest free status.”
• The national anthem is called “Yumi, Yumi, Yumi.” Do not confuse with this.

You’re welcome.

I shouldn’t have to remind you of this by now, but it’s October again, and therefore it’s time for the Boobie-Thon. (They actually started late on the 30th of September, but surely no one has a problem with that.)

On the other hand, if you’ve read this far and are thinking “WTF”?, here’s how it all came about and what it’s for, except that where it says “raised over $17,000,” you’ll want to read “raised over $74,000.” I’ve been promoting it on a regular basis for several years, and I’ve also kicked in some small fraction of the fundage, which explains the presence of the graphic. (And the current title seems a bit less unsubtle than the one I was planning to use: “Save the Racks!”)

(Previous announcements: 2010, 2009, 2008, 2007, 2006.)

Elysa Rice of GenPink floated an idea up to the Twitterverse yesterday:

thinking about adding disclaimer to my bizcards “your possession of this card does not give you permission to opt me into your mailing list”

I like the idea, but I probably wouldn’t be able to read such a disclaimer without heavy magnification. And could this even work? What are the chances that card collectors might actually honor such a statement?

I suspect many offices are like this:

A quick survey of our newsroom revealed most of my colleagues are unenthusiastic about the quality of their seat. But ask a few cubicle denizens who owns the nicest chair, and strong opinions emerge.

Many of my colleagues acquired their current chair after a co-worker departed. While some just take the chair they are offered — and I found more than a few sitting in seats that date back two decades — others feel strongly about their personal furniture.

Outside the executive chambers at 42nd and Treadmill, there is only one Really Good Chair, and I have it. It is large, as I am, and it dominates the room, as I do not. (Various bits of corporate hardware dwarf me in height and occasionally even in width.) It was something like $400, and was purchased to match, within reason, my personal dimensions.

I don’t spend the whole day there, though:

[O]ne-third of office workers spend eight or more hours a day at their desk in front of a computer. That’s longer than the average adult spends in their bed each night.

That I couldn’t do. For one thing, I’d have a hell of a time getting up again. (Questionable knee joints.) Better to pop up and down several times an hour.

An item for the “Wish I’d Said That” files, from NoOneOfAnyImport:

[I]f my posts have given the impression that I’m a pleasant person, well there’s some serious misrepresentation right there. I’m a major pain in the you-know-what, and I can be more disagreeable than a plague of locusts riding in on a half-mile-wide tornado.

Sheesh. She says that like it’s a bad thing.

(Title swiped from Click and Clack, who have evidently hired many of the Payne-Diaz clan.)

A couple of days ago, I reported on my new cell phone:

So I have a shiny new LG flipper, which if anything is a step down from the old one: there’s no place for a MicroSD card, so people will be spared my “Friday” ringtone. (For now.)

During the next 48 hours, I ran up against its limitations: the internal memory is extremely meager (hint: the SIM card holds a whole lot more than the phone itself), and the camera was below average, even for a below-average price point. I returned to the Big T, paid the restocking fee, and came away with a three-times-as-pricey Samsung with almost identical key functions, a well-concealed but usable MicroSD slot, and a better, if still not wonderful, camera. What’s more, it does 3G, though I wouldn’t know one G from another.

And yes, that ringtone is in place, though I admit I’m pondering the idea of knocking out another one with the voice of Cee Lo Green, for use with Certain Less-Favored Callers.

I’ve never owned a Windows-based phone, but I imagine that when they die, they die in a manner similarly to the way my Nokia did: white power-up screen, then fade to black, then back to white, then back to black, repeat once more, and then assumption of paperweight status.

So I was in the T-Mo store yesterday afternoon, exploring options, of which I had basically one and a half: get a new phone, and do I want a new contract or not?

“It’ll be at least eighteen months,” I said to the clerk, “before the Death Star takes over.”

He nodded sadly. “I am not looking forward to that.”

So I have a shiny new LG flipper, which if anything is a step down from the old one: there’s no place for a MicroSD card, so people will be spared my “Friday” ringtone. (For now.) To the Big T’s credit, they didn’t segregate the Phones For Cheap Bastards: this one was right in the middle of the display. And I apparently had had the foresight to copy most of my contacts to the SIM card, because I lost only a handful. And my contract goes into its eleventh and twelfth years, because these people have yet to shaft me for anything substantial, which is practically unheard of in the wireless business.

(Found, perhaps, by a Church Lady at FAILBlog’s That Will Buff Out.)

Saturday I dropped into the local tag agency and paid a ghastly sum for a little rectangle of plastic with a barely-legible 2012 on it, and having finally learned to remember the expiration date on my driver’s license, I decided that 0.5 stone per bird was a more efficient use of my time, and ambled over to the other side of the building to do the renewal.

And HAL balked: “I’m sorry, Dave.”

“Dave’s not here,” I was ready to point out, but my lack of Daveness notwithstanding, HAL refused to yield, and I was directed to the nearest Driver Examination Station under the auspices of the Department of Public Safety. (Any similarity to any other state’s DMV is probably justified.) Which, it being Saturday, was closed.

First chance I got to break away from the salt mine was this afternoon. Now you should know that “nearest” does not necessarily mean “near”: the only station in Oklahoma City proper is on the far southside, which meant a trip to either Yukon or Edmond. I opted for the latter, contriving to arrive 75 minutes before closing. This got me a 50-minute stay on what you’d get if they’d ordered chairs to match the Group W bench, after which I was admitted to the Inner Sanctum. I presented all manner of paperwork, as required; the high priest punched several thousand buttons, issued me a slip of paper, and bade me return to the tag agent, with the promise that HAL would keep his trap shut.

It was at this point that I realized the folly of this whole operation. It was the last day of the month. What was I thinking? Still, in for a penny, in for a euro or three, and after fighting a whole battalion full of ardent members of the Anti-Destination League, I arrived at the tag agent, to find 18 people ahead of me with thirty minutes to go. Collars, as they say, were getting hot under.

Still, I kept some semblance of cool until the transaction was completed and I was safely out the door and I noticed the 107°F on the dashboard.

Now what caused all this brouhaha? You can charge me with contributory stupidity for trying to do this on the 30th of a thirty-day month, but the real culprit was some feckwit of similar name and description who was wanted by the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania for various unspecified high crimes and misdemeanors. Driver’s-license compacts being what they are, the Keystone Kops asked everyone else to keep a lookout for said feckwit, and of course, DPS and HAL were happy to oblige. (Now of course I’ve been to Pennsylvania, but having dinner with the prettiest girl in Philadelphia is not, so far as I know, illegal.) I have no idea what material DPS had to review to persuade them that I wasn’t the drone they were looking for — they’re not about to give away trade secrets — but I do wish to express my desire that the perp be caught and beaten to within an inch of his life.

Come to think of it, make that half an inch.

The Redneck Diva and family set off toward the mysterious East:

It was just as we crossed the state line into Arkansas a radio commercial came on with background music of a more hillbilly persuasion than we are used to. Sam reached over the touched my arm and whispered, “Drive faster, Momma. I hear banjos.” That sent us three girls into a laughing fit like no other. We also passed Connie’s House of Products which made us all howl with laughter. What a name. Not “House of Amazing Bargains” or “House of Stuff You’ll Put in a Garage Sale Next Summer” or even “House of Awesome”, but simply “House of Products”. I guess it’s up to you to decide what kind of adjective to put on those products.

I’m betting on “nondescript.”

A bit of vandalism at Rebecca Black’s house:

Says she:

Someone wrote this on my driveway, made me laugh! There was more but it got washed off. /: Thanks to who did this! :D <3

And that’s your “Friday” update for the week.

Addendum: Question to me, posed on Facebook: “What are you, a Rebecca Black groupie?” Um, not. I figure, though, that anyone who is so cordially hated on the Net is worth some of my time.

Sunday, the world as we know it having ended the day before, the Oklahoman ran a six-page supplement to promote “the next generation” of the paper, with various and sundry goodies available at various levels.

The digital-only package, for those who’d just as soon not deal with the print version, runs $15 a month (which is, I note, cheaper than the actual print version on a daily basis), and it includes the Digital Replica, which duplicates, to the extent possible, the actual print version in a Web browser; the smartphone version (available for iThings and Droid so far — the Digital Replica is apparently about to be ported to the iPad); and access to the archives, all 110 years’ worth. The latter may be the best part of the deal.

This is, however, not the answer for those who subscribe via Kindle, Nook or whatever the hell that thing is that Sony has been pushing: those deals remain unchanged for now.

Interestingly, there’s a digital-plus-print deal for $12 a month; in addition to everything in the digital-only package, they throw you an actual Sunday paper. I’m guessing that the humongous number of advertising supplements involved was the deciding factor here. (And look at all the coupons!)

There’s a single-product a la carte deal for $9.99, which I assume was offered so they could say they had something under ten bucks.

Now I actually pay for the print edition, so all the digital stuff I get as a bonus, at least for now. (And frankly, I browse better in print than I do in a, um, browser.) I do think OPUBCO has learned something from watching other publishers fumble with paywalls and other clumsy constructions, and is trying to insure some revenue streams without actually ticking off the readership.

The deal here is simple enough: compare the new auto-insurance bill to the old auto-insurance bill, and kvetch as appropriate. It is with considerable amazement that I report, however, that there is no change in the premium this time. None. Not so much as one thin dime.

(Yes, this is a repeat from November, which in turn was a repeat from May ’10.)

So I wrote to Springfield to get a copy of my birth certificate, because, um, I might need it for something. Yeah. That’s the ticket.

The Certification of Vital Record returned to me was a nice, crisp piece of contemporary bond paper with what looks like a tamperproof background, upon which they’d photocopied the original 1953 certificate, complete with its handwritten correction. The copy was dated and signed, probably by machine, by the Deputy State Registrar, with the following notice: “This is to certify that this is a true and correct copy of the official record filed with the Illinois Department of Public Health.”

I mention this, not because birth certificates are big news these days, but because it’s an example of Illinois government doing something effectively and efficiently.

Nicole, on Evan Williams’ distilled spirits:

It wasn’t horribly expensive and it is in the list of the last name alcohol you probably shouldn’t be on a first name basis with (Jack, Julian & Evan).

Jack, of course, everyone knows, but I had to think a bit about Julian. Eventually I came up with Julian Van Winkle III, who runs the Old Rip Van Winkle distillery, which suggests that Nicole’s tastes might be just a hair more refined than mine. (Then again, I did my serious drinking in the NCO Club, where quantity tended to overshadow quality.)

George Dickel, incidentally, was not available for comment.

Lisa recounts the Legend of the Phantom Chicken of Sonoma, and even has pictures of the mysterious bird:

[F]or the past month or so, I’ve been fretting about a rooster who seems to have been abandoned in some wild land across the road from our back pasture. This is an area that, unfortunately, has been used for a long time for dumping, for teen partying and other nefarious activities. It’s also an area overrun with foxes and coyotes — who are so bold as to come out and sit there staring across at the terriers behind the fence. So, when I heard a rooster crowing from over in that area, I immediately assumed that he’d last about a day and a night before being torn apart by wild canids.

He lasted a day and a night and several weeks more. Clearly his sense of timing is nonstandard:

Instead of crowing at dawn, he crowed continuously day and night. Since chickens are flock animals, I assumed he was desperately calling for his hens. To dump off a rooster in the wilds like this is tantamount to sentencing him to solitary in Guantanamo. Except solitary confinement would come with the added danger of evisceration by wild animals. I began cursing the creep who couldn’t find a new home for the poor avian — or at least give him a merciful and meaningful end as Coq au Vin.

Still, he’s avoided that evisceration for a month now. For all we know, the Phantom Chicken may be the avian equivalent of The Shadow, clouding the minds of predators. Or maybe it’s just that coyotes have become leery of unusual birds after all these years.

I’d done a preliminary run-through of my 2010 tax return in late January, inasmuch as I’d received all the pertinent forms to be included therein, and the results were sufficiently deflating to the pocketbook that I resolved to stall as long as possible. Nothing had changed between then and now, of course, but I still had to print out all that paperwork, review it for internal consistency — by which I mean “if you use the middle initial on the 1040, don’t spell out the full name on Schedule A, you knucklehead” — and then write a large check. So that was yesterday’s project, between dinner (combo #2 at Popeye’s) and the basketball game, motivated at least slightly by the desire to get this damn thing out of the house so I don’t obsess over it any further.

And no, I didn’t consider farming out the task to one of the professionals, such as they are; I used to be one of the professionals, such as I was, and I’m pretty good at keeping up with things.

Still, every year I start the form, I ask “Why the hell doesn’t Congress do anything about this?” The answer, unsurprisingly, is always “Why should they care? It’s not like they have to do this themselves.” Which suggests a piece of Fantasy Legislation: all 535 of them have to complete their returns, on camera, live on C-Span, on April 14th. If that doesn’t give them some motivation to clean up this misbegotten system, nothing will.

Snipped from a newspaper with a sense of the Zeitgeist:

Clearly Rebecca Black controls the universe.

(Courtesy of Oleg Volk.)

At my advanced age, I am entirely too aware of the consequences of losing one’s memory, and so I try to keep some activity going in the brain pan whenever possible: I balance the books before I hit the calculator, and I avoid vegging out in front of the tube.

Once in a while, though, I get sent off into a remote corner of the memory bank quite involuntarily. Yesterday I was shuffling through entirely too much paperwork and a surname somehow landed in my field of vision, a surname that matched up with someone I had (slightly) known.

She was then close to my age now, and she’d come to work for us briefly. She’d been married, but apparently he decided he was entitled to someone younger and/or prettier and/or something else I’d just as soon not know.

Joe Tex began to sing in my head:

If you think no other man wants her,
Throw her away and you will see,
Some man will have her before you can count,
One, two, three.

I summoned her image from the dusty archives just this side of my ear. Weirdly, or maybe not so weirdly after all, that image was built upward from the floor: long, narrow (but usually not pointed) shoes, a decent pair of legs, a hemline careful to offer no invitation, ditto on the neckline, a slightly twisted smile, and hair that had stopped somewhere between yellow and white. I was, for a moment, impressed that I’d recalled that much, inasmuch as we’re talking the last century here.

And then I glanced down at the paperwork again. By Thor’s second-best mallet, the full name was the name of her ex.

I thanked Mr Tex for his time, and went back to work.

No, this is not a Carnival of the Vanities announcement. That was back here in ought-five, though the following comment was added to it by a reader:

Wikipedia places the value of the Sommerfield fine-structure constant at 137.03599911.

Speaking of which, Ric Locke pointed out this past weekend:

There’s no discernible reason it should have that value; scientists have been looking for the “why” ever since it was first defined, with no tiniest glimmer of a way to find a clue, much less actual evidence — but if it were different we wouldn’t be here, because many processes go the way they go because of that value.

The anthropic principle doesn’t say the fine structure constant has that value because we’re here; it says we’re here because the fine structure constant is what it is — if it were different it would still be what it was, but there wouldn’t be any physicists to calculate it. It answers the “many worlds” and “multiverse” hypotheses by saying, in effect, “So the f* what? Pay attention, people!”

Similarly, Richard P. Feynman (source):

It has been a mystery ever since it was discovered more than fifty years ago, and all good theoretical physicists put this number up on their wall and worry about it. Immediately you would like to know where this number for a coupling comes from: is it related to pi or perhaps to the base of natural logarithms? Nobody knows. It’s one of the greatest damn mysteries of physics: a magic number that comes to us with no understanding by man. You might say the “hand of God” wrote that number, and “we don’t know how He pushed His pencil.”

I will say this: Construct a circle. Divide it by two radii to form the golden ratio. The smaller of the two sectors will be close to — but not exactly — 137 degrees.

And unwilling to be exclusionary, I’ll add this: Physicist Wolfgang Pauli, who was one of the worriers described by Feynman, died of pancreatic cancer in 1958 in a hospital in Zurich — in room 137.

Magazines have fallen in love with auto-renewal schemes: they know you’re coming back, and all they have to do is charge your plastic and send you a perfunctory notice. Most implementations of this have sucked greatly, as I informed whoever does the subscription fulfillment for the Atlantic the other day.

So far, the only non-problematic version of this that I’ve seen comes from Mother Jones, the left-wing investigative-journalism mag, and here’s why, from their not-so-perfunctory notice:

The credit card we have on file ends with [number redacted]. Please let us know if that card is no longer valid. And if you would like to use a different credit card, or if you choose not to renew your subscription, please indicate your wishes on the form above and return it to us ASAP. You can also write to subscribe at motherjones.com.

This covers all the conceivable options, except one, without having to negotiate a Web site or, worse, voice mail. However, the one exception is on the return form: “Check enclosed. Please do not charge my credit card.” Which is what I did.

The rest of you guys should pay attention to your Mother.