Akaky Bashmachkin is in receipt of boxer shorts with some sort of camouflage pattern, and while he’s certainly grateful, he’s also somewhat puzzled:

I must tell you now that I regard the sudden militarization of my underwear drawer with no small degree of trepidation. I do not know right now what my policy should be in the event these new boxers attempt to extend their control from the underwear drawer to the sock drawer or, worse yet, should they attempt a violent overthrow of my tee-shirt drawer, which may lead to a destabilization of the world underwear order and the possibility of a conflict hitherto unheard of in the annals of underwear. Appeasement does not appear to be the right policy; we all know what ultimately happens to appeasing powers when they passively face an aggressor; but nothing in the boxers’ current behavior suggests that there is any immediate cause for alarm. There is merely a vague disquiet settling over this particular chest of drawers, a troubling disquiet similar to the psychic tension that haunted Europe in the years between 1933 and 1936.

I must note here that I own garments of this sort in white, grey, black, and blue, and they seem to coexist just fine. (White, I note in passing, is a minority.)

Still, there’s something vaguely pointless about this particular pattern:

The purpose of camouflage is, as I understand it, is concealment from people who are naturally, politically, or personally hostile to you. To achieve this admirable circumstance, nature and the world’s militaries do their best to blend into their natural surroundings. Given that underwear’s natural surroundings are under your trousers, hence the origins of the word underwear, the whole point of camouflaged boxer shorts would seem an exercise in inutility, if not just plain dumb. The wearer, of course, might choose to make use of the boxers’ camouflage effect by wearing the shorts on the outside of their pants, but this will cause chafing after a while, especially on a hot day, and the practice does tend to lead to political and social upheaval in Central America, a tragic and for most part unforeseen consequence that the American political philosopher Allen Konigsberg first pointed out in the early 1970′s.

The difficulty in the banana republic in question, however, was not so much with the design, such as it is, as with the regime’s demand that the citizens change their underwear every half hour.

Andrew Ian Dodge has given us a Newly Minted Carnival of the Vanities, the 359th of the series.

For some reason, this makes me think of Junius Bassius, prefect of the city of Rome, who converted to Christianity very late in life — on his deathbed, some say. The inscriptions on his newly-minted sarcophagus were clear about the conversion, perhaps less so about the actual date, though we do know he died in 359.

Roberta X reports:

I didn’t mention the other part of the rumor about certain possible allegations made by the presumed Editor of a supposed local newspaper to a State Legislator: said Editor has accused the NRA of putting a flaming bag of dog poo on his porch.

Then again, the Fourth Estate should respect the turd:

If you are the Editor of a major bigtime newspaper and you are doing your job properly, you ought to be finding a bag of flaming dog excrement or something similar on your doorstep at least once a week.

Gads. Mencken lived in vain.

Actually, he lived in Baltimore.

(Yes, it’s a Firesign rewrite. Let them plant a sackful of feces flambé on the premises.)

To hear Jenn tell it, it’s the head of the Republican National Committee:

With [Byron] Dorgan retiring and [Arlen] Specter in trouble the balance of power in the Senate is ready to shift, but I am sure Michael Steele will find a way to throw it away.

Brittany Cohan is no more impressed:

Michael Steele’s silence on the race in Massachusetts and his inability to follow through on the very topic of his own book is louder than his constant media presence these days.

I’m starting to think the GOP could be better run by this Michael Steele.

This 2003 piece on “titanium” credit cards was titled “Make mine zinc.”

American Express would like to make yours zinc Zync:

The basic card costs $25 each year and includes participation in the Amex Membership Rewards points program, though it does require you to pay off your balance every month. You can choose from among four “packs” that yield extra goodies. The Go pack, for instance, costs another $20 annually and doubles the points you earn on airfare. The Social pack has the same price and doubles points for restaurant, concert and theater purchases.

The company plans to introduce more packs soon and perhaps tweak the existing ones, depending on the feedback it’s soliciting in an online community called the “Zync Tank.”

Of course, Zync isn’t designed for me, and I already have an American Express card anyway; it’s intended for that particular subset of twentysomethings who still think semi-clever respellings are kewl.

Still: you heard it here first.

There’s bookburning in Britain, but not for the reason you might think:

Volunteers have reported that “a large number” of elderly customers are snapping up hardbacks as cheap fuel for their fires and stoves.

Temperatures this week are forecast to plummet as low as -13°C in the Scottish Highlands, with the mercury falling to -6°C in London, -5°C in Birmingham and -7°C in Manchester as one of the coldest winters in years continues to bite.

Workers at one charity shop in Swansea, in south Wales, described how the most vulnerable shoppers were seeking out thick books such as encyclopaedias for a few pence because they were cheaper than coal.

It occurs to me — it’s certainly occurred to Bill Quick — that this would be an ideal time for Al Gore to donate several zillion copies of Earth in the Balance
during this Time of Crisis.

Temperatures in Oklahoma City this week are forecast to drop as low as -14°C.

There are four million fewer motor vehicles on American roads than there were this time last year:

The United States scrapped 14 million autos while buying only 10 million last year, shrinking the country’s car and light duty truck fleet to 246 million from a record high of 250 million, according to the report to be released on Wednesday by nonprofit group the Earth Policy Institute.

About 700,000 vehicles were scrapped through the government’s Cash for Clunkers program, though there was no effect on the total number of cars in the fleet because each one was replaced by a newer model.

EPI, of course, is hailing this as The Dawn of a New Age:

The United States, the world’s biggest petroleum user, “is entering a new era, evolving from a car-dominated transport system to one that is much more diversified,” said Lester Brown, the president of the EPI.

Well, more diversified, anyway. And with sales not expected to rebound much in 2010, we might be able to see a repeat of this post in early 2011.

November 2008. The Hornets trounce the Thunder, 105-80; P. J. Carlesimo is relieved of his coaching duties before the plane leaves for the next game — against the Hornets, this time in New Orleans. We lost that one, too, and we haven’t beaten the Bees since, although this one was wickedly close: 97-92, in a game that was in doubt until the last few seconds, in which the Thunder, down three, failed to get off a good shot, and James Posey finished the job with two free throws.

It didn’t matter that OKC outrebounded New Orleans, 44-35, or that they held Chris Paul to 14 points; CP3 ably distributed the ball, logging 13 assists, and all five Hornets starters finished in double figures, David West getting a team-high 19 and Peja Stojakovic hitting four of ten treys. (Peja didn’t even try from inside the arc.) What undid the Thunder, ultimately, was bad fourth-quarter shooting: three of 14, for a whole 11 points. Jeff Green, at least, was back in good form, picking up 20 points, and trusty Kevin Durant dropped in 27.

On the upside, hey, it’s the Hornets, and I suspect most of us still have a soft spot for the Bees, Berry Tramel notwithstanding. And we get two more shots at them this season.

The Pacers will be here Saturday, the second game of the homestand.

The Oklahoma City Police Department is now posting the official Jail Blotter on a daily basis; the most recent 30 days are available, in PDF format. Not searchable, but at least decently readable.

This is in compliance with 51 O.S. 24A.8. Incidentally, the date of birth is included for each person named in the blotter, although, as Dr Joey Senat notes:

Oklahoma City and Oklahoma County officials have recently refused to disclose the birth dates of their government employees, claiming it would be an unwarranted invasion of privacy.

So long as those employees stay out of jail, I guess.

It’s Gabrielle Reece’s 40th birthday, and I dare say, neither volleyball nor motherhood has wrecked her physique.

Here she is on the orange carpet at the 42nd Annual Academy of Country Music Awards in May 2007. Her second child was born on New Year’s Day in 2008, so she was ever-so-slightly pregnant in this shot.

David Brooks wants you to know that he’s a member of the Educated Class, which, according to Purple Avenger, means he’s not entirely useless:

The “educated class” is useful because they provide job security for plumbers. They’re all too stupid to change a leaky flapper valve themselves. Thousands of plumbers would be out of jobs were it not for the “educated class”.

Before you ask: yes, I can change a flapper valve.

According to the new biography Star: How Warren Beatty Seduced America, by Peter Biskind, the Actor Formerly Known As Bulworth has bedded, in succession, 12,775 women, “a figure that does not include daytime quickies, drive-bys, casual gropings, stolen kisses and so on.”

This figure apparently is open to debate; it seems rather high to me, though anything with two digits seems rather high to me.

I do hope he’s had his shots, or whatever one takes these days.

“Awkward” seems fair enough:

The WaPo news section reports … that since the Underpants Bomber, Michael Chertoff has been repeatedly telling the media and anyone who will listen that we need to buy lots of full-body scanners for airports, without mentioning his own financial interest — one of the Chertoff Group’s clients is Rapiscan Systems. (I assume the first syllable of Rapiscan is pronounced with a soft a as in rapid, not a hard a as in rape. If I were planning to sell scanners that pictured people naked, I’d have put some more thought into that name.)

Back in Elizabethan times when I went to school, these were “short” and “long” vowels respectively, rather than “soft” and “hard,” but none of these adjectives make me feel any better about scanners that picture people naked.

(Via Fritinancy.)

Willie Mitchell, your all-purpose Memphis music guy for over half a century, has died at the age of 81. He’s probably best known for his work with Al Green during the early 1970s, while he was running Hi Records. Over at Single File, I’ve put up a piece about the record that introduced me to Mitchell back in 1964: the stomping instrumental “20-75.”

Not to be confused with a thousand pictures, this is the answer I give, usually qualified with “somewhere around,” when someone asks how much stuff is on this here Web site. (And actually, there probably are a thousand pictures; just pulling the graphics directory via FTP accounts for nearly 100k of bandwidth.)

Eventually it occurred to me to install a WordPress gizmo that will count the words in the current database: this includes all the posts since the second week of September 2006, plus my share of the comments. Up through post #9666, says said gizmo, I have put up … 2,277,421 words. This does not include any of the Vents or any of the material that’s outside WordPress.

Incidentally, post #9666 is the 6,966th post in that series. The reason for this is simple: at one point, WordPress decided to start keeping every single version of every single post, each of which gets its own ID number. By the time I figured that out and put a stop to it, I’d burned through about 2700 extra database entries, most of which have now been ruthlessly excised.

Even more incidentally, the Movable Type archives, which end right before WordPress kicks in, end with post #7209; if I remember correctly, I wasted 19 entry numbers during those four years, so there were actually 7,190 posts. I suspect that there are at least a million words in that archive also.

It’s like road rage, except at the keyboard, says Amba:

A desktop is a minivan or SUV, a laptop a sedan or coupe, an iPhone or BlackBerry a sports car. The screen is the windshield. The keyboard is the gearshift and steering wheel. The engine is your brain. Slow-loading sites are traffic jams or stoplights. Don’t you curse and swear at the keyboard or keypad just the way you do behind the wheel? The only difference is, you can’t see the competing drivers and you don’t have a horn. Maybe computers should come with horns for the self-expression of frustration, which is how drivers use them 90% of the time anyway.

At the moment, I’d settle for a better windshield washer.

The one difference here is that you can seldom determine why it is these flipping Web sites are coming up so slowly, whereas finding the culprit for any given traffic jam is simply a matter of catching up to the front of the line. And if he’s been flattened like Wile E. Coyote after a plunge off the edge of the cliff, it seems churlish to yell at him: he’s suffering enough, I figure.

When I went househunting back in 2003, I had a few specific criteria in mind:

I don’t, of course, need 1500 square feet. My current Meager Hovel is about two-thirds that size, and it’s all I can do to keep up with the cleaning, though I can always blame it on work hours, which are either long or longer. What I really want is a ceiling that vibrates only when the Air Force passes overhead, and a place to park my car that’s defined by something more than a couple of yellow lines. And apparently I’m willing to pay dearly for these amenities.

It would not have occurred to me to ask The Expert, several years my senior and seemingly more than a couple of clicks toward the Prim side of the continuum, to limit the search to places which afford enough privacy for me to go about without bothering to get dressed.

Which is not to say that such a thing has never been done before:

I asked my Realtor about this issue, explaining what it was all about. Here is her response:

“This is not as strange as you think! If they let me know a little more about what they are looking for — like bedrooms, price, etc — I don’t really care what they garden in — I can send them listings and when they find one they might want to see, I would get as much info as I could with maps and such they could peruse before they committed to a showing. Could even get a map so they see exactly where the neighbors are in relation to the property. You might be surprised to know all the strange requests I have had. The requests did not make anyone less special as individuls. You gotta like them as they are or you miss a lot of life!

“They don’t need to know anything about what I know of their lifestyles if they would feel uncomfortable with that, however, it helps to know as much as you can about a client so you can help them find what they are looking for. And if they would rather not work with me, just let them know if they explain they want a great deal of privacy to a realtor, that would be sufficient, but tell them to ask for maps and a lot of info before they go on showings.”

There have been, of course, and probably still are, agents who specialized in this sort of thing.

A distinction with a difference, by Steph Waller:

My personal philosophy is that I am the driver of my body-vehicle, not the vehicle itself. That’s what has made aging easier for me than it was before I really grasped that idea. Like a car, my body ages, but I, the driver inside, am the same age I ever was — I am ageless. My dreams brought this home to me this morning because in my dreams I am never any younger or older than about 30. That means something to me and, as I step into the final phase of my time on this planet, it’s a comfort.

I hadn’t thought about this before, but my own dream experience is similar: unless it’s spelled out early on that it’s the childhood version of me, there’s no real indication of my age in any of my dreams. Certainly the infirmities of age don’t play any role therein.

As for driver vs. vehicle, this sounds something like C. S. Lewis: “You don’t have a soul. You are a Soul. You have a body.” And there are worse things in life than sounding something like C. S. Lewis, whether or not you subscribe to Lewis’ particular faith.

You should read the whole piece; there’s much in it about the place dreams occupy in our lives, and why they’re there in the first place.

Brad Graham, proprietor of the Bradlands, a site I’ve had bookmarked seemingly since forever, is gone far too soon at forty-one.

He’d be memorable if all he’d done was come up with the term “Must See HTTP://,” but he was eminently quotable just about all the time. For instance, as quoted here seven years ago:

If I had responded to all of the spam e-mail I received in the past two weeks, I would have 350,000 free business cards, 250 miniature radio-controlled toy cars, and would have netted approximately $7.4 billion from assisting various deposed heads of state in securing their rightful fortunes.

Also, my penis would be 56 inches long and I would have seen more than a lifetime’s worth of vaginas and boobies.

There’s a remembrance thread at MeFi.

One of these days I want to find out just what it is Scott Brooks is telling the Thunder at halftime. The Bulls led by as many as 12 in the first half and took a five-point lead into the locker room; twelve minutes later they were down 13 and wondering what the hell happened. It wasn’t a thing of beauty, exactly — the Thunder committed twenty turnovers — but what mattered was the final, which was Oklahoma City 98, Chicago 85, the Atmospheric Phenomena’s 19th win in 34 tries.

Then again, the Bulls put together some good numbers: they led the battle for the boards, 52-48, including an amazing 25 offensive rebounds, and all five starters landed in double figures. Both Joakim Noah and Luol Deng checked in with double-doubles; Derrick Rose led the Bulls with 19 points. What Chicago didn’t get was a lot of field goals for all those offensive boards: they shot only 35.4 percent, putting up 99 shots, including nine treys, of which only three made.

For once, Kevin Durant got to watch someone else get game-high honors, and that someone else was Russell Westbrook, who dropped in 29 points. Kid Delicious had 25; James Harden’s shot returned from the Twilight Zone (13 points, including three of five faraways). The OKC bench beat the Bulls bench, 25-12.

There follows a nice, leisurely — in the sense that it’s spread over eight days, anyway — four-game home stand: the Hornets (Wednesday), followed by the Pacers, the Knicks and the Spurs. I would advise not taking any of them lightly.