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.

(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.

Note: not valid for all definitions of “dork”.

That said: what a dork.

(Courtesy of SteveF, who is not a dork.)

I’d caught a fleeting glimpse of him now and then, but never enough to be sure I was seeing what I was seeing, though the circumstantial evidence was sufficiently strong. (As Trini once discovered to her discomfiture, mice will in fact go on your mouse pad.)

Then I withdrew a temporary trash bag from the box I was using for support, and visual confirmation was immediate, albeit short-lived: the furry little sumbitch held on just long enough for me to see him, and then performed a half-gainer to propel himself behind the nearest article of furniture. I marveled at his gymnastic ability, and then vowed revenge.

Traditionalist that I am, I had a couple of standard spring-loaded traps on hand; I tested one, found it presumably satisfactory, loaded it with a dollop of Jif, placed it near one of his favorite haunts, and went to bed.

Next morning, I found the trap, untripped, three and a half feet away from where I’d parked it, and the bait cleaned away with considerable efficiency. Hardware malfunction? I poked it with a Bic pen, and SNAP!

I’m starting to think that meeces (whom I hate to pieces) have evolved to the point where they’re too smart for these primitive attacks on their, um, person.

We’ve already established that yes, bears shit in the woods.

But what about zombies?

(Via Pop Culture Junk Mail.)

It’s an actual Open Thread. Try not to stir up any litigation, wouldja please?

I’ve done this before, more than once, but never let it be said that I am averse to recycling an old premise.

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 May.)

Church mice, so far as I know, didn’t take a vow of poverty, but they are universally recognized as poor, and therefore presumably are discriminated against:

For some reason, this title burst its way into my head Monday afternoon after lunch; when I stumbled across this picture (thank you, TYWKIWDBI), I knew I had to put it to use.

“Canadian couple find second python in their home.”

Just to add to the terror level:

One snake is an anomaly. Two snakes are a family. And a local pet store informed the couple that they’ll likely meet some reptilian siblings in the near future.

Where’s Samuel L. Jackson when you need him?

Based on last year’s experience, I brought in slightly less candy stock — only 5 lb or so — and figured I’d get two dozen or so trick-or-treaters.

Yeah, right. I got twenty in the first ten minutes, and the supply was completely gone in 60 minutes after I’d served 102 goblins, which is far and away the most I’ve ever seen in this neighborhood.

Weirdest outfit: someone was done up as Blinky, the three-eyed fish from Springfield.

Addendum: Yeah, I know. Read this.

I decided yesterday to pitch out about three years’ worth of old magazines, and rather than toss them into the trash, I opted to haul them to the nearest Paper Retriever, a large green (of course) bin located at various schools and churches around town. The idea is that a recycler (specifically, these guys) will come and pick up the detritus and pay the organization for collecting it.

Last time I’d done this, I’d gone to Sequoyah School on 36th, but I noticed on the commute home this past week that St. Stephen’s, a Presbyterian church on 50th, had installed a Retriever, and they’re closer to me, so I headed out to their parking lot.

And the bin, as tall as I and even wider, was full. My normal procedure is to insert the container (usually a copy-paper box) into the opening, turn it 135 degrees, and then withdraw the container. There wasn’t enough room for the box; I barely managed to cram the contents of a single grocery bag into the space remaining. Either the Retriever hasn’t retrieved here lately, or there’s been a sudden upsurge in paper recycling in these parts.

So I drove off to Sequoyah, where the remaining paper (two boxes, three bags) was consigned to the bin.

Tangential arachnid story: When I went out to the car to load up all this stuff, there was a small black spider crawling across the spoiler. I generally prefer not to bother spiders, but this was work, dammit, so up came the trunk lid. It took me three trips to finish the job. I pulled down the lid, and there was the spider, still doing its slow crawl.

And despite occasional raindrops and 25-mph winds, the spider was still there when I got to St. Stephen’s, though at some point during the unloading attempt it departed.

There’s an official definition of the second:

The second is the duration of 9,192,631,770 periods of the radiation corresponding to the transition between the two hyperfine levels of the ground state of the cesium 133 atom.

Provided, of course, that you’re at absolute zero (0 degrees Kelvin), which you’re not. Which probably doesn’t explain how it is that time, whether it’s expressed in seconds or decades or something in between, seems pretty elastic now and then:

The bizarre thing is that time goes by really fast, but there’s a lot of it. Or it goes further away faster. Or something.

So it seems amazing that we’ve lived here for 4 years already, but our arrival here also seems unfathomable eons ago. It seems like less than 4 years in its speed, but more in its length. A moment flits by and shoots away into the far distance.

Which reminds me, not too surprisingly, of this:

The late musicologist and audiophile Edward Tatnall Canby used to say that the length of your perceived memories is a constant, that as you get older the years get closer and closer together, like the calibrations on a VU meter as the volume — as your volume — diminishes into inaudibility.

It seems amazing to me that I’ve spent twelve percent of my entire life here at the palatial estate at Surlywood — hey, I just got here — but that’s what the calendar says.

Pertinent quote from a long-time quilter:

“We do a lot of quilting for other organizations,” [Laverne] Ray said. “So really, a lot of the quilts we do, we give most of them away. People try and buy our quilts, but if you think about it, they wouldn’t even be paying us minimum wage, hardly even 25 cents an hour for the time it takes to make one of these.”

Not that I have any experience as a quilter, really, but I did once contribute a square to a quilt, including a bit of decorative stitching (which involved some actual machinery and one of those wacky plastic cams) and one appliqued piece (which I did by hand), and it took me over an hour to get it to the point where I deemed it satisfactory.

You will not see me smirking at quilters.

Boobie-Thon 2010 is under way, and as always — this is the ninth version — it’s a surprisingly simple drive that raises more money than you’d think. (The take for the first eight years ran upwards of $60,000.)

As part of the deal, you get to see some perfectly nice racks and some imperfectly-nice racks, and you get to pass some cash to Susan G. Komen for the Cure. (There is a parallel drive for cleaning up the Gulf Coast; you can donate to either or both.) It’s very easy to be snide about “raising awareness,” but I figure there’s no better way to raise awareness than to show you just what it is you’re trying to help: it’s more than just another pink ribbon, folks.

Despite Mr. Porretto’s suggestion that I have too much time on my hands, I continue to work long hours and strive to get something resembling an adequate quantity of sleep.

Besides, the ultimate goal of the punster is to come up with something as sick and twisted as this:

There was a boy of Italian parentage named Carbaggio, born in Germany. Feeling himself a misfit, with his dark curly hair among all those blond Nordic types, he tries to be even more German than the Germans. In late adolescence he flees to Paris, where he steals one of those brass miniatures of the Eiffel Tower. Arrested by the police, he is given a choice of going to jail or leaving the country. He boards the first outbound ship and arrives in New York. Thinking he would like a career in communications, he goes to the RCA building in Rockefeller Plaza, takes an elevator and walks into the office of General Sarnoff. Sarnoff tells him that the only job available is as a strikebreaker. The boy takes it. When the strike ends, he finds himself on a union blacklist. He goes to work making sonar equipment for a company owned by a man named Harris. After several years, his English has improved to the point where he gets a job as a disk jockey. His show is called Rock Time. He has fulfilled his destiny: he’s a routine Teuton, Eiffel-lootin’, Sarnoff goon from Harris Sonar, Rock Time Carbaggio.

Paul Desmond, who was twenty-nine the day I was born, came up with this classic bit of Parthenonsense shortly thereafter. Until such time as I can top this, I keep on keeping on.

For instance: World War I will end this weekend.

Wait, what?

The First World War will officially end on Sunday, 92 years after the guns fell silent, when Germany pays off the last chunk of reparations imposed on it by the Allies.

The final payment of £59.5 million writes off the crippling debt that was the price for one world war and laid the foundations for another.

And who’s getting paid, exactly?

Most of the money goes to private individuals, pension funds and corporations holding debenture bonds as agreed under the Treaty of Versailles, where Germany was made to sign the ‘war guilt’ clause, accepting blame for the war.

By coincidence — or maybe not — Sunday, 3 October 2010, is the 20th anniversary of the reunification of Germany, following the fall of the Berlin Wall.

(Via Finestkind Clinic and fish market.)

Occasionally I fumble my way through the archives, just to see what I was thinking, and this is what I was thinking on the first anniversary of 9/11:

So far, things have been very quiet. The calm before the storm? Maybe, maybe not. But we’ve made it through storms before, and we’ll make it through this one.

In the meantime, this would be a fine time to turn away from the screen for a moment and turn toward someone you love.

And then say so.

Things haven’t been quite so quiet this year, but otherwise, I wouldn’t change a word of it.

For a change, this isn’t from my life, but from the life of someone I follow on Twitter: “You should not shave your legs when you’re angry.”

The payback, apparently, is swift. Not to mention sharp.

Those who might have wondered how (or if at all) my mind works might be interested in the events of this afternoon, starting at Braum’s at 39th and Penn.

5:11 pm: I open the passenger-side door so I can toss in my bag of goodies. I glance backwards for no good reason. Tires, generally, are black; the right rear one is showing a spot of shiny silver. Panic mode ensues.

5:12 pm: My tire shop of choice is not far — 10th and May — but they close at 5:30. “I’ll make it,” I decide, and head down Penn.

5:13 pm: It occurs to me that if I hang a right on 10th, I’ll have to make a left turn across traffic, which at this hour of the day sucks [your choice of vulgarity]. I decide to turn on 23rd instead and come down May. A thousand feet farther, trivial in the grand scheme of things.

5:15 pm: I actually turn on 23rd.

5:16 pm: I discover they’re repaving 23rd from just east of Villa all the way west to God knows where. Traffic, however, is not bad.

5:17 pm: Traffic has suddenly become bad. Three vehicles ahead is a city bus, which most certainly won’t be in a hurry.

5:18 pm: Red light, green light, red light, no progress. Choice Anglo-Saxonisms can be heard if you’re close enough.

5:20 pm: Green light, four vehicles get through. I am the fourth.

5:22 pm: I arrive at the tire place with a “Shoot me now, fercrissake” expression. They pull the offending screw, about ¾ inch wide — and ½ inch long, nestled neatly in the tread, never broke the surface. A splash of the usual soapy solution: no leak.

5:27 pm: I depart, and while waiting for an opening, I cast my eyes upward. “Um, thank You, I guess, but You could have saved the favor for someone who needed it more.” And then I shut up, fearing I’d said too much, and Journey came up on the stereo.

In the kitchen last night, I was dousing a couple of chicken breasts with one of those commercial sauces ostensibly imbued with hickory smoke, and I got to wondering: how much hickory wood goes to make stuff — tool handles, flooring, sporting goods — and how much ends up in the barbecue pit?

I subsequently expended much of my vaunted GoogleFu trying to get something resembling an answer, but couldn’t come up with anything much more than this:

Carya tomentosa (Mockernut hickory, mockernut, white hickory, whiteheart hickory, hognut, bullnut) is a tree in the Juglandaceae or Walnut family. It is the most abundant of the hickories. It is long lived, sometimes reaching the age of 500 years. A high percentage of the wood is used for products where strength, hardness, and flexibility are needed. It makes an excellent fuelwood, too.

This suggests that furniture outweighs flavoring in the current scheme of things, which is fine with me. I didn’t follow up on the nuts, but I figure sooner or later some wise guy will want them ground up and blended into a cocktail: it’s a hickory daiquiri, Doc.

My laundry sorting tends toward the perfunctory: I don’t wear much white, before or after Labor Day, so I don’t pay much attention to colors as I load up the tub. (Fabrics, yes: I don’t want the socks with the slacks, because they take twice as long to dry.)

I hadn’t done any wash since the preceding Sunday, so the hamper was fairly full, and in it I discovered three red shirts. Not a problem for sorting, but I had to wonder: was I expecting to beam to the surface and die?

Many sites have a FAQ file, for those frequently-asked questions. (Being on a lower plane of existence, I have a collection of occasionally-asked questions.) Once in a while, though, I have to fake up answer a question that was never asked at all, such as this:

“How can I get myself into one of your ____paloozas?”

Which, inevitably, means “How can I look like Zooey Deschanel?” The answer is here.

(Passed to me by the vacationing Uncapped in Uxbridge. Purely by coincidence, when the link arrived here, I was listening to She & Him.)

The woman previously known as Jacqueline Passey has posed the following question:

If a woman with breast implants gets bitten by a werewolf, what happens to the implants when she changes form?

I’ve done about 1080 degrees of eyeroll so far, and I still haven’t come up with an answer I’d deem satisfactory. (Or, I suspect, that she’d deem satisfactory.)