Drugs have expiration dates. But do they actually expire? Maybe not:

[M]edications in the US generally are stamped with a really, really conservative “expiration” date. Some foodstuffs that don’t actually expire have expiration dates stamped on them as well. The legal points for meds are that FDA regulations (which I’m sure the pharma industry didn’t fight too hard against) require the medicine manufacturers to stamp their products with a date to which they “guarantee the full effectiveness” of the medicine. For marketing reasons, they generally stamp them at the 2-3 year mark, not because the medicines lose effectiveness that quickly, but because they sell more meds if people don’t realize the things are good (with proper storage) up to 10 years.

During the days when I was having lots of dental work done, I’d be prescribed, say, 10 units of a painkiller after a procedure; usually the discomfort was gone after two or three, so after a while I had a decent-sized store of variations on the theme of Lortab. This came in handy during last year’s Horrible Farging Pain, and you may be sure that I took the oldest pills first. They weren’t quite ten years old, but they’d have gotten there quickly enough.

Then again:

On the one hand, if the manufacturer is required to “warranty” the efficacy of their product, it’s probably best for them to limit their liability by not guaranteeing it for too long. On the other hand, by mislabeling that date as an “expiration” date, they’re tricking unwary consumers.

Food products lately are often labeled “Best if used by [date]“; perhaps this is a reasonable statement for drugs as well.

“Kerry Washington,” said noted asshat John Mayer, “will break your heart like a white girl.”

I have no idea what he meant by that, so here’s a picture of Kerry Washington in a little navy-blue dress by Luella, circa 2007.

Eat your heart out, John.

This month in Playboy, singer John Mayer steps on his schwanz. (The heavier steps have been reproduced all over the place, including the HuffPo.) Those who track the Zeitgeist more effectively than I do, which is almost everyone, seem to be split on whether Mayer is some sort of racist for disdaining black women and blaming it on the Little Head, or whether he’s simply an asshat with a Big Mouth.

Aaryn B. leans toward the latter explanation:

Honey, you are an affront to frat boys everywhere and that’s a damn near impossible feat. You are not smart. You are not cute. You are not deep. You are not intellectual or witty or cool or hip or dope or fly or whatever it is you fancy yourself to be. You have a small, small, small brain and a very big mouth. You are a self-important asshat raised to the 11th power, quadrupled by dickheadery, topped with three servings of phony and one heaping scoop of overcompensation.

I’m glad I didn’t piss her off.

Warning: That page from which I quoted incorporates some photos that some people — those with taste — may find disturbing.

Sara Blakely, inventor of Spanx, explains why she’s started making men’s garments:

Men’s undershirts have been underperforming for as long as they’ve been around, with stretched out necks and bulky cuts that do nothing for the male physique. The men in my life (and in Hollywood) have been asking me to make Spanx for men for years, so I was inspired to create comfortable and powerful undershirts that provide instant gratification without gimmicks.

Well, I suppose it’s a hell of a lot better than wife-beaters, which still hold the record for Worst-Named Garment.

As with Snuggies, there will inevitably be competition. I blame Steve Carell.

(A wave of the sleeve to the Left Coast Cowboy.)

This week’s Carnival of the Vanities, the 364th, is titled “Snowpocalypse (except in Maine).”

Which, I suppose, means that it’s not difficult to get out to the Maine Mall in South Portland, located at 364 Maine Mall Road.

“In German, or in English, I know how to count down,” said Tom Lehrer in his Wernher von Braun voice, “and I’m learning Chinese.”

The good Doctor perhaps should consider Smitty’s advice as an alternative:

[I]f I wasn’t using my spare language time learning German, I’d focus on Spanish. Among that blessings the country enjoys today is the English language. It’s as important to the country as the opposable thumb to the flesh. But it was born after Hastings, when Norman French ran roughshod over Anglo-Saxon.

I predict, by the power of the rectal pluck, that in another 400 years or so the slow merger of English and Spanish shall be shown to have been an overall win.

By then, of course, we’ll have adopted just as many words in lolcat. (“¿Puedo tener una hamburguesa con queso?” just seems too formal.)

As posted to her Facebook page:

Jan Graham Borelli, age 55, went to be with the Lord on Wednesday, February 10, 2010. Born April 10, 1954 in Chattanooga, TN. She is the daughter of Dr. Frank B. Graham, III and Dorothy Hall Graham. Jan was an outstanding educator of more than 30 years known for her dedication to her students no matter what their age. Most recently she was the principal at Westwood Elementary School in the Oklahoma City Public Schools (OKCPS) district where she had worked for a combined 17 years. While in the district she also served as principal at Roosevelt Middle School, Webster Middle School, Southeast High School and Northeast High School. Currently she was also employed as an adjunct professor at Southwest Baptist University and Kaplan University.

There’s a lot more, of course; we’re talking a seriously rich life. And somewhere it intersected with mine. On the subject of me, she once blogged:

If I weren’t happily married and tied down with all kinds of material debts, I would run off to Nova Scotia with him.

We never got that far, of course, though she did subsequently schlep me along to the Grill on the Hill. Capitol Hill, that is.

Some of you may remember this little incident:

The teachers and their students came up with the theme of the gift of education money from the lottery. The teachers gathered discarded, cancelled lottery tickets from convenience stores. The kids cut ornaments from the discarded tickets and even folded and cut some of the tickets into three-dimensional mathematical shapes. They cut the top tree star out of a lottery poster. Ping pong balls with numbers carefully written to mimic the big lottery drawing balls were strung together with twine and bows to complete the decoration. After school on Wednesday, the church across the street provided vans to take the kids up to the State Capitol to decorate the tree allocated for our school.

The Capitol was abuzz with excitement as children from schools from all over the state decorated their trees as we decorated ours. The Governor and his wife went from tree to tree and posed with the students from the different schools. Our children excitedly gathered around the Governor, the Mrs. and Santa Claus to get their pictures taken. We were so proud of our tree and our creative theme.

Then the bottom fell out:

[A radio] reporter accused us of having our children sell lottery tickets. We were accused of an inappropriate display to publicize the lottery. We were accused of a lot of heinous things. What had started out as a clever idea turned out to be a sinister plot to undermine the morality of our culture.

When our annual event was over that afternoon, I called the state representative whom the radio station (and subsequently the television station) told us had called them about the tree. I apologized to him for having caused such heart burn. I explained that we had no intention of making a political statement and would gladly remove the tree. I did not wish this nastiness to besmirch our children or embarrass our Governor who had allowed the children of our state to decorate Capitol Christmas trees. I hope our controversy will not ruin this event for all the children and schools.

I followed it up here, which is how she discovered my existence.

And you know, I’d miss someone like this even if she weren’t a pretty blonde with a fabulous smile and a brain the size of a planet.

Fare thee well, Dr. Jan. See if you can knock some sense into those angels.

Accent on “always.”

(Seen at Morgan Freeberg’s place. I heard somewhere that this was actually aired during some sort of football game.)

The plumber stared in disbelief. “Roots, all right. But this is a plastic line.”

Which, as we used to say, can mean only one of one thing: the suckers had grown into the junction between the metal pipe inside the house and the plastic stuff that leads to the city sewer. It’s a good ten feet from any actual trees, but trees don’t much care about distance.

For now, the suckers have been cleared away. For later, I’m thinking in terms of something that works like copper sulfate but less likely to kill everything within a twelve-yard radius.

Generally, you won’t find the Lost Ogle among my choice of go-to guys for Biblical commentary, but while I was studying up on this new American Hockey League team we’re getting this fall, I happened upon this semi-exegesis of Luke 15:11-32:

[T]here is one question I have about this group … resurrecting minor league hockey in this town. They were previously called Express Sports which made sense considering that it was a branch of the Bob Funk empire (built around Express Personnel). Now, the group goes through a name change which was obviously meant as an allusion to the Biblical story of the prodigal son because, as anybody who knows House of Pain lyrics would recall, the son returned.

The thing is, the son was not called prodigal because of his yo-yo quality. In fact, here is the primary definition of prodigal from the dictionary:

1: characterized by profuse or wasteful expenditure : lavish

See that’s the part of the story that gets left out. The returning son took his inheritance early and basically blew it on wine and whores. He went back to his father’s home after going flat broke in hopes he would no longer have to live on the street.

Technically, I think that Prodigal may still be an adequate name. Express Sports was accused of bankrupting the Blazers by getting visions of grandeur that they needed to be playing in the larger Ford Center rather than the cozy, and cheaper rent, Cox.

The NeoBlazers/Oil Kings/Puckheads/Whatever presumably won’t have these issues: they’re playing in the Cox (which is being updated to, they say, “NHL-caliber ice”), and Funkmaster Bob is being kept on a leash by the parent club in beautiful downtown Edmonton.

Iran, says President Ahmadinejad, is now a “nuclear state”:

In a nationally televised address in the square, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad proclaimed that Iran has produced its first batch of uranium enriched to a higher level, saying his country will not be bullied by the West into curtailing its nuclear program a day after the U.S. imposed new sanctions.

“The first package of 20 percent fuel was produced and provided to the scientists,” he said, reiterating that Iran was now a “nuclear state.” He did not specify how much uranium had been enriched.

Leaders of the Democratic Party in the United States professed concern, but expressed their confidence that Ahmadinejad had pronounced “nuclear,” or its Farsi equivalent, correctly.

In other news, North Korea announced that it would rebrand itself as a tourist destination and would seek a partner to construct two five-star, or maybe it was five two-star, hotels in downtown Pyongyang; Somali pirates proposed a Safe Passage Weekend; and an item of intimate wear alleged to have been worn once by former Alaska Governor Sarah Palin turned up on eBay, where it was purchased for $11,621. We are unable to confirm that Andrew Sullivan spent the next day begging Atlantic owner David Bradley for a raise.

(Iran story via Jenn, who apparently was expecting a lot more of an announcement from Tehran.)

In the beginning there was the Snuggie, and it was good. Or at least it was warm. Sort of. If you happened to be on a pub crawl in a Snuggie, you were probably warmed more by the ethanol than by the fabric.

Inevitably, there would be knockoffs of the Snuggie. There exists, for instance, something called the HoodieFootie, which stretches the concept about as far as it can go.

But the bottom line, I think, remains unchanged:

I figure every Snuggie defender from Taunton to Tacoma will be here shortly.

(Blame this on Lisa.)

The Post-Star of Glens Falls, New York is partially retreating from the Web:

Today we started removing items from our free Web site — comics, letters to the editor, puzzles, TV grid and letters to the editor.

The idea is to wean people off the free Web site and either get them to buy the print version or the e-edition, which is just a PDF of the paper.

Evidently the letters to the editor are so heinous they have to be removed twice.

On the other hand, I suspect that those letters are the one thing people — the people who write the letters, anyway — will actually pay for. (Comics can be had from the syndicator, occasionally delayed, like it matters so much with Rex Morgan, M.D.)

And no one, Web or otherwise, has come up with a really good substitute for the old, dead TV Guide.

But here’s the kicker, from Wikipedia:

For a time, the Post-Star maintained two distinctly different online presences. PostStar.net was an all-inclusive, subscription-based offering; Poststar.com is freely available and advertising driven. As of April 2007, PostStar.net ceased operation.

See also “insanity, definition of.”

(Filtered out of the stream at the Professor’s.)

The NFL Players Association, James Joyner suggests, is not your typical labor organization:

An NFL franchise employs 53 players (45 of whom may be active on game days) plus up to 8 more on their practice squads. There are 32 franchises, so that’s 1440 regular players plus 256 practice squaders who make a relative pittance. That’s not a lot of labor for a multi-billion dollar a year industry.

Like actors and musicians (who are also represented by unions) the marquee talent get most of the money paid to workers because they’re the draw. While using a different welder on a car frame won’t impact Ford’s bottom line, substituting an attractive brunette from the local community theater for Sandra Bullock, the guy who sings on the street corner for Prince, or Joe from the docks for Peyton Manning would significantly impact ticket sales. Similarly, the bottom dozen players on the roster — who Bill Parcells referred to as JAGs for “Just A Guy” — get the NFL’s version of minimum wage, as do the bit players in films or the session players on music recordings.

Admittedly, bit players don’t make much — most members of the Screen Actors Guild earn less than they’d make working at Carl’s Jr. — but “the NFL’s version of minimum wage” is, for the season just ended, $310,000.

The NBA, which has only 450 roster slots — fifteen for each of 30 teams — pays even better: $457,588 is this season’s minimum salary. Players in the Developmental League earn peanuts by comparison, though players already on NBA rosters who are sent to the D-League continue to draw their NBA-level salaries.

That said, there are some similarities between the various Players’ Associations and traditional trade unions:

Sports owners have been forced by labor laws and court decisions to bargain in good faith with their players. It wasn’t all that long ago that even superstar players had to accept whatever the boss deemed fair. And the various player’s unions have negotiated better working conditions, pension plans, injury settlement practices, and minimum scales for rookies and veterans. Further, the ability to negotiate these things collectively rather than on a player-by-player basis has doubtless made some things easier for owners, too.

Indeed. And the current NBA agreement ends in 2011; there weren’t that many changes from the 1999 agreement in 2005, but this time around, the owners are reportedly taking a hard line in an effort to control costs. Last time they did that, nearly half the season was wiped out.

(Spotted by Trini. Original source here.)

Foot’s Forecast reports on the UltraKahuna from somewhere along I-95:

Two Mid-Atlantic blizzards in one week? It’s dangerous living on Earth sometimes; soon you’ll be living history right before your eyes.

I suppose it’s better than living, oh, Remedial Algebra.

Incidentally, Monday’s wet dusting brings the total snowfall at Will Rogers World Airport this winter to 19.9 inches, though we haven’t exactly been overrun with Kahunage since Christmas.

(Via Fishersville Mike.)

From this very quarter, last month:

Julia Baird in Newsweek argues “the case against settling,” mostly as a shot across the bow of Lori Gottlieb, who’s written a book called Marry Him: The Case for Settling for Mr. Good Enough. One problem, says Baird, is Gottlieb’s assertion that women expect too much.

Now The Last Psychiatrist has found another problematic assertion by Gottlieb, this time in The Atlantic:

To be fair, my conceptualization of what a good relationship is may be very different from hers. Here’s hers:

“In my formative years, romance was John Cusack and Ione Skye in Say Anything. But when I think about marriage nowadays, my role models are the television characters Will and Grace, who, though Will was gay and his relationship with Grace was platonic, were one of the most romantic couples I can think of.”

Nothing characterizes The Dumbest Generation Of Narcissists In The History Of The World better than using throw away cinema as a template for life. What kind of results did she expect?

The Atlantic article is here. Here’s the bit that gets me:

Each time I read about single women having babies on their own and thriving instead of settling for Mr. Wrong and hiring a divorce lawyer, I felt all jazzed and ready to go. At the time, I truly believed, “I can have it all — a baby now, my soul mate later!”

Well … ha! Hahahaha. And ha.

And so she did, and now she grumbles:

Just as the relationship books fail to mention what happens after you triumphantly land a husband (you actually have to live with each other), these single-mom books fail to mention that once you have a baby alone, not only do you age about 10 years in the first 10 months, but if you don’t have time to shower, eat, urinate in a timely manner, or even leave the house except for work, where you spend every waking moment that your child is at day care, there’s very little chance that a man — much less The One — is going to knock on your door and join that party.

On the other hand, as Lloyd Dobler once said, “If you start out depressed everything’s kind of a pleasant surprise.” But then, he’d say just about anything.

(Spotted by the Twisted Spinster of Spleenville.)

I own a microwave oven. A small one. It is used for the lowest forms of cookery, by which I mean “warming up leftover pizza.”

(Certainly not so low as microwavable popcorn, which 98 times out of a hundred produces something so horrid and toxic you need hazmat assistance to dispose of the bag and gale-force winds rushing through the house to dispel the stench.)

It would never occur to me to do anything serious in the little metal box, and there’s a perfectly good reason for that:

My problem with the microwave, and my position against buying one lo these many years, is that they are essentially useless technology. By that, I mean that a microwave can’t do anything that another device can’t do better. Except the few things that it can do which are really not particularly needed.

Want to make a great meal fast? The pressure cooker can make a from-scratch meal just as fast and make it three times better. Microwaves seem to alter the texture of foods. And not for the better. By contrast, the pressure cooker infuses everything it cooks with concentrated flavor. My verdict: the ecological niche of “fast cooking” is more than adequately filled. No need for a microwave.

Even some of the crummier processed-to-death-and-then-some items I’ve been known to try out contain the following warning: “[Brand name] does not recommend microwave preparation.” When even vendors of extruded foodlike substances argue against it, you have to figure that something is dreadfully wrong somewhere.

Disclosure: Yes, when I was a newlywed, we had a genuine Amana Radarange, which weighed as much as a Delco battery and had damn near as much chrome as the Chevrolet that battery might have come out of. Someone actually stole the silly thing; I hope the hernia was worth it.

I don’t think anyone anticipated this: a sweep of a three-game road trip. New Orleans, maybe; Golden State, probably; but Portland? No way. This team hasn’t won in the Rose Garden since the French and Indian War.

Until now. The Thunder shut down the Trail Blazers early on, watched them come back, and then dispatched them handily in the fourth quarter to win it 89-77.

One can argue that the Blazers weren’t at full strength, but they haven’t been at full strength all season and they were still seven games over .500. In Portland, you step up: Nicolas Batum got 12 points in his first start; rookie forward Dante Cunningham had 14 points (a career high) and six rebounds. LaMarcus Aldridge, who always bedevils the Thunder, had 15 points and 15 boards; Andre Miller dropped in 22 points. Yet the Blazers missed 17 of 20 treys; Steve Blake and Rudy Fernandez combined to miss ten of them.

So the Thunder saw their chance, and they took it. Down two after three quarters, they poured it on: James Harden, who had barely been seen up to that point, rolled up 14 points in the fourth. Jeff Green had yet another reliable 17-pointer; Kevin Durant did the double-double thing with 33 points and 11 boards. They weren’t so much better from beyond the arc — five of 16 — and in fact, the Blazers outrebounded the Thunder, 47-41. But OKC pulled off 17 steals, which gives them 33 in the last two games.

The West continues to knot up. Denver is second, 4½ back of the Lakers; OKC, now at 30-21 — did anyone expect this team to have won 30 games at the All-Star break? — is sixth, 4½ back of the Nuggets. And the Grizzlies, in 11th, are only four back of the Thunder.

The Thunder are on pace for 48-34. Maybe I can work up to uttering the P word later on.

I have been to Hoboken, New Jersey exactly once. (Believe me, I had my reasons.) I did not, however, attempt to park in the Mile Square City: it appeared that my one and only chance would have been to bring a parking space with me, in the manner of Acme’s Portable Hole, but not being a Super Genius, I couldn’t figure out a way to carry one in the trunk.

And apparently it wasn’t my imagination, either:

In recent decades, the city has been filled to the brim with cars parked parallel on street, double parked, triple parked (not so common nowadays), and further crippled by torturous three-year waiting lists for monthly spots at municipal lots where near-market rates are already well established (for the faint of heart, you might want to skip past this next piece of data: the price for a monthly space in a city-owned garage ranges from $180 to $215 per month). Efforts to protect pedestrians by enforcing sight-distances from intersections are met with heavy, emotional protest from weary drivers who hunt daily for a scant stretch of curb alongside which to wedge in their car.

It was less of a strain, I concluded, to book a room in North Bergen and take a cab into the midst of the fray. Once again, I was ahead of the trend:

Hoboken can leverage the large number of licensed taxis to make driving one’s personal car around town a silly idea. We are doing this by working with taxi owners and operators to identify locations for new pilot taxi stands, and to educate the public that hailing a cab is not just something to do in New York City.

Besides, unless you can claim Rand and McNally as dependents for tax purposes, a cabbie, even in New Jersey, is more likely to know the way around town.