I got this from the Neighborhood Association, and I’m reprinting it here on the off chance that someone reading might need it — and to point to an instance where some stimulus funds might actually do some good.

During these hot days of thinking of cooler months, my attention turns to energy usage and how to be more efficient. I learned about a great program that assesses homes to determine steps that can be taken to reduce energy consumption and save money! The Community Action Agency of Oklahoma City and OK/Canadian Counties, Inc. (CAA) received American Recovery and Reinvestment Act funding from the Department of Energy, through the Oklahoma Department of Commerce to expand their Weatherization Assistance Program. The best part, it is FREE — you need only meet the eligibility requirements of residing in Oklahoma or Canadian County (different agencies cover the rest of the state) and have income at or below 200% of the federal poverty level (one person can earn up to $21,660; two up to $29,140; four up to $44,100 etcetera). Priority is given to senior citizens, persons with disabilities or disabled occupants, and children under 12 in the home. Furthermore, renters can apply, as long as the landlord signs a contract agreeing to a few requirements. Applications are necessary and can be obtained by calling the CAA Weatherization Department, 405-233-0199 ext. 1409. I encourage you to check it out — and stay comfortable!

Details on CAA’s Web site.

Andrea Harris happens upon some male fashion theory, credited to one “Tim Benzie” of London:

There is a theory about bow ties which explains why they’re so unsexy. A regular long tie is a phallic symbol, both suggesting the phallus and directing the eye south, and below the belt. The shape and dimensions of a bow tie however reflect the shape of the mouth, suggesting that what the wearer has to say is of more value than the contents of their pants. (This perhaps explains the popularity of bow ties with academics.)

I’ll keep that in mind next time I’m tying a seven and a half four-in-hand.

Dogette announces the rules for what’s left of the tropical-storm season:

I hereby decree that it shall be a crime to invoke the phrase “packing winds” in a news story any more.

It’s not just verbal clichés that cheese her off, either:

I hereby decree that it shall be a crime for a TV reporter to don raingear and stand in the wind and sideways rain near a wobbling STOP sign while yelling to the camera dude “Can you get a shot over there!? As you can see, we have a downed palm frond! It’s incredible!” while the camera dude pans over to a single frond lolling in the roadway.

With fronds like these, who needs anemones?

I hereby decree that it shall be a crime to show footage of the Home Depot aisle with the plywood, also the aisle with the batteries. Also, no footage of a guy loading plywood into his pickup truck. And no footage of signs on windows, “Go away [storm name]!”

And so forth. Serenity notes in comments:

All this so that when the real hurricane shows up, everyone is jaded and does nothing to prepare.

Of course, they don’t have Gary England.

Westbound, I-44 near the Broadway Extension. I’m going to exit at Classen, so I’ve moved into the left lane, which is moving at around 62 mph. Not bad for 5:05, if I say so myself.

Then it drops to 50, to 40, to 30. To twenty-seven. As I and the truck ahead of me ease down the ramp, I spot the culprit: an Oldsmobile, vintage early-1990s, being driven at the pace of an Oldsmobile, vintage early-1900s. The poor sod had his flashers on, so I refrained from denouncing him, on the basis that he’s probably afraid to stop, lest he never get started again, and God only knows where he’s going to get off.

A few minutes later along the Northwest Distressway, it becomes apparent that I’m not going to get through the signal at Pennsylvania, and mouthing an inaudible curse, I bring Gwendolyn to a halt.

And as I do so, along comes Mr. Curved Dash to my left, and he runs the light.

This time, the curse wasn’t inaudible.

(Swiped from eminent Wooter and Photoshopper “glasswindow”.)

Laura’s GPS is visited by the spirit of Eric Cartman:

I started turning it on going back and forth to work because I had downloaded Eric Cartman’s voice from South Park (no, they did not have George Clooney) and I liked his sassy directions. Some days I would even take a different route home just so I could hear Cartman cuss me out in different ways. He says things like “Turn right at the light, asshole. Jesus Christ, I said turn right you goddamn Jew!”

Presumably coming soon: Kyle’s mom reminds you to change your oil.

Found in some guy’s online-dating profile:

If I were a girl, I’d date me!

I believe that meeting someone online “in-person” for the first time must be effortless. You don’t get a second chance to make a first impression so if you flake for any reason, or take my number and not call me within 48 hours, we won’t get along. I have zero tolerance for indecisiveness, games and flakes. So here I am in a nutshell. More in detail when we meet. I’m driven, hard working and a good catch. I think your friends and family would like me. I think you’ll fall head over heels in love with me if you get to know me. I’m at the stage in my life where I would be interested in a fun, meaningful, long-term relationship, taken one phase at a time. We don’t have to jump right into anything serious, but it would be nice to meet someone that I enjoy sharing my time with and vice versa. If you think we’ll pair well together, I’d like to hear from you and please feel free to ask questions. Thanks!

Disclaimer: My apologies for being straightforward. It’s my personality. I would be interested in meeting like minds a/k/a straight shooters. Take a look again at my pics, what you see is a man who knows what he doesn’t want. Any women up for the challenge?

That first line, to me, screams “NARCISSIST!”

And what’s with the “disclaimer”? Isn’t that just a bit too precious?

Miss Melisa Mae translates for us:

I’m your typical male. I’ll be hot and heavy in the beginning but bore of you easily. I want a long term relationship but don’t have time for one. I do however have time to constantly log onto my online dating account. “I’m straightforward” really means I’m going to tell you that you are old and your biological clock is ticking. Don’t bother calling me because I won’t return your calls but you better answer mine or I’ll consider you a flake.

It occurs to me that she could be filling a genuine marketing niche here: the person who explains to guys why their online profiles suck so badly. For a not-too-small fee, she could intercept the profile before it goes live and suggest the sort of corrections that will reduce the possibility of reader derision.

And, of course, she reserves the right to post the most egregious failures on her blog.

Disclaimer: Were overall reader derision to be substantially reduced, opportunities for blogfodder derived therefrom can be expected to experience similar reductions. Your mileage may vary. See writer for details.

One advantage to having made something like 14,000 blog posts (not to mention the presence of about a thousand items that aren’t blog posts) is that I get relatively high placement in search engines. The downside, of course, is that I get more than my share of search strings like these.

Why Does Pop Have Sodium in It:  So that the rest of us can justify calling it “soda.”

what jobs the world needs:  One dire need is for people to review the ever-increasing new laws and classify them into three basic types: unnecessary, intrusive, and downright harmful. (Expect some overlap.)

diet shoes:  The inevitable result of putting your foot in your mouth too often.

is windex bad for washer fluid:  Apart from being about four times more expensive, probably not.

fudge train going nowhere:  Not all maps show the Brown Route.

turd tattoo:  For a lot less money and a whole lot less discomfort, you can get the genuine article.

betty veronica archie naked:  Mr Weatherbee will be furious.

margaret trudeau nude upskirt photos:  Were she nude, there’d be no skirts to photo up.

what happens when walmart moves:  You have this big empty concrete box and nothing to fill it with.

kosher poptart brands:  You might try Kellogg’s Frosted Mini-Matzos.

“the shock annihilated her brain”:  It didn’t, however, prevent her from winning another term in Congress.

We are stardust, we are golden, but mostly, we are profitable.

That John Mackey piece in the WSJ apparently upset some people who expected the CEO of Whole Foods, fercrissake, to be champing at the bit for the adoption of Obamacare, prompting this observation at Half Sigma by someone identified as “Darwin’s Sh*tlist”:

The points that Mackey are making are mere policy prescriptions, some of which may be worth enacting, and some not. But SWPLs see everything in moralistic terms: theirs, and everyone elses. They’re so used to being catered to and flattered (thank you, Richard Florida) that they can’t conceive of any reasonable person disagreeing with them about anything.

Despite all of their ostentatious “awareness,” many of them live lives that are every bit as cloistered and insular as those of suburban housewives. When they run into unexpected resistance, as here, the reflex is exquisitely reactionary: Don’t touch our belief system — it hurts.

The good thing is that with their low fertility rates, they’ll be going the way of the Shakers in a generation.

I continue to believe that Pauline Kael, at least, did actually know a few Nixon voters.

And Sonic Charmer can’t wait for the boycott to spread:

The fewer pale-skinned vegetarian-pizza-buying organic-chocolate-scarfing giant-carrot-cake-carrying water-in-plastic-bottle-they-carry-in-a-mesh-attached-to-their-backpack-guzzling white-girl-dreadlock-having nose-ring-sporting lesbian-till-graduation-participating Whole Foods fanatics I have to wait in line behind just to buy my kombucha, the better.

Which tells me that I’m not getting my share of Adjective Stimulus bucks.

“There’s a great deal of variety in people’s attitudes toward savings and debt,” says Will Wilkinson:

Both sides of the ledger are morally valenced for many people. I’m a weirdo who reads too much economics, so I see my accumulated human capital as serving much of the insurance function of money savings. So, despite the fact that I remain a net debtor in money terms (student loans!), I feel well in the black.

For the inverse of this, I need only look at myself. My balance sheet is actually in the black, though the comparatively-low liquidity of the assets will tend to make the liabilities look that much frightening.

And I’d hate to try to place a dollar value on my “human capital” beyond the numbers available on Form W-2.

Some people are ashamed of debt, because it’s debt, and hasten to wipe it out. Others act like credit is free money and run up debt until it explodes in their face. Then they go bankrupt. And then, later, they do it again. Some Spockish types will make minimum payments on debt indefinitely, as long as the interest rate on the debt is lower than the interest rate on investment or the value of present consumption. Some people require a cushion of savings for minimal peace of mind. Others are happy as long as their checking account doesn’t dip below zero before the next paycheck. Etc. So I think it’s probably hard to draw a really useful generalization about the intrinsic utility and disutility of savings and debt.

I am not persuaded that these are all separate reactions: indeed, I myself have managed to run the gamut of them, sometimes two or three of them more or less simultaneously. I’m old enough to have been brought up in a milieu where debt was considered a Bad Thing, the inevitable consequence of the cardinal sin of envy; this attitude, however, has not kept me from putting debt to use, and occasional misuse. Perhaps I can blame this on being a weirdo who has not read enough economics.

Next year John Lennon will have been gone thirty years, and there’s always been one question I wanted him to answer, but he never did.

Or so I thought. The current Goldmine set me straight, sort of.

Cut to 14 September 1969, the day after Live Peace in Toronto 1969, with the Plastic Ono Band. Kim Fowley had emceed the Rock & Roll Festival, where those tracks (and video) were recorded, and the next day, he asked John point-blank, in the presence of the entire band: “Why did the Beatles break up?”

Fowley tells it this way:

The whole room stopped, and Lennon looked at me and said, “May I give you an example?”

“Yes.”

“It has nothing to do with the wives and the women we married.” He said, “The group was based on us re-inventing our favorite records.”

I said, give me an example.

He said, “You know ‘Why Don’t We Do It in the Road’?” We were improvising on Canned Heat, and it was our message to Canned Heat and Norman Greenbaum, who had “Spirit in the Sky” at the time. When you do that kind of music, put more humor into it. We liked Canned Heat but didn’t think they had enough humor. So we wrote that song as taking the Canned Heat formula and doing something else with it. When the Beatles stopped re-working or improvising on the formulas of their favorite songs, that’s when we ceased to be a band. Because that’s what we did. Because we improved on formulas that we loved of our favorite records. We stopped listening to records and improvising on the formulas, the techniques and expanding, and that’s when we ceased being a band.”

I’ll buy the Canned Heat story, since “On the Road Again” was a big hit in the summer of ’68 while the “White Album” was in production, but “Spirit in the Sky” came out as a single in February 1970, almost half a year after Toronto. Then again, the Beatles were ahead of their time.

The whole Toronto story is in Harvey Kubernik’s “Backstage Pass” feature, in Goldmine #759. It’s apparently not on their website yet.

The style rookie, now thirteen and, as she says, “rather cynical and cute as a drained rat,” shows up in what appears to be these ASOS wedges, presumably acquired on her London trip, and delivers the following unexpected shoe wisdom:

I also just realized these wedges (80% off, juuuuust sayin) are knockoffs of two pairs of Marnis combined which makes me feel like a hypocrite since I argue constantly with my friends about knockoffs/the integrity of the artist/designer prices. (I will maybe post a rant about such eventually.) I like to wear them when I listen to Janis Ian and read magazines. Luckily I bike more than I walk, and you can’t bike in heels, so I don’t wear these often enough to ruin my future of having non-deformed feet. My mom likes to scare me with google images.

Two observations:

• Not everyone agrees that you can’t bike in heels.
• I find it somehow gratifying that someone thirteen is listening to Janis Ian, inasmuch as I was listening to Janis Ian when I was thirteen. (“Society’s Child” was released in 1966, when Janis was thirteen, but did not chart until the summer of 1967.)

As for the shoes themselves: meh.

A Daily Pundit commenter encapsulates the entire Cash for Clunkers experience:

I’m in the process of getting a new company car, and had a discussion with the local Ford dealership management.

The biggest disconnect between the ‘clunkers’ program and the reality of the effort is that ‘clunkers’ were never the target — SUVs are.

Jeep Cherokee, Ford Escape, Chevy Blazer, and a wide variety of mid 90s minivans are piling up in scrap yards from this program.

Truly POS cars that spew burning oil but get decent mileage don’t qualify because the interest in getting them off the street is minimal. It’s all about the evil SUVs.

Of course, the fact that most of those SUVs were turned in for new, higher mileage SUVs — especially those offered by non-government motors brands Ford, Toyota, and Nissan — highlights the wisdom of the average American.

At least twice a week I find myself at an intersection behind some late 80s/early-to-middle 90s automotive excrescence — foreign, domestic, doesn’t matter — and I have to lunge for the Recirc button to keep that POS’s roiling plume of pure pollution out of my car’s ventilation system. Of the last four such I’ve encountered, only one would have been legally Clunkable, though all of them should be forced off the road as a matter of environmental protection. (Another disconnect: all life on earth is allegedly threatened by carbon dioxide — your friendly neighborhood tree will disagree — but this Pennzoil-roasting-on-an-open-fire stuff, which you can see for half a block, is overlooked by the True Believers.)

Got to hand it to the Democrats, who can have every tool of power at their disposal and still create a craptacular waste of money that proves another of their theories — that everybody would buy a compact if they were given the right incentive — doesn’t hold up when confronted by reality.

I suspect here that the operative word is “tool,” in multiple definitions yet.

Tim Fall writes in the Oklahoman’s real-estate section:

For families coveting a desk for their kids in the renowned Deer Creek Public School District, the bump in the road has often been the price range of homes in Deer Creek neighborhoods.

In the northwest reaches of Oklahoma City and west of Edmond, where the rolling prairie meets one of the nation’s best school systems, housing additions catering to the first-time buyer or young family have not always been a prominent part of the landscape.

Normally I’d ignore this sort of thing, but there was this item at the top of the weekly land-sales report in the Business section:

Jason and Terri Roselius from Robert S. and Linda R. Brock, 5208 Wisteria Lane, $3.25 million.

In desperation, I cried: “We have a Wisteria Lane?” Well, no. Actually, it’s Wisteria Drive, per both Google Maps and the County Assessor. Still, it’s a three-million-dollar house, in Gaillardia, and, yes, it’s in Deer Creek schools. (And if $3 million doesn’t faze you, the median house price around here is a mere $159,000 these days, about where it’s been for the past three years.)

Preamble
1987
Mike Wilkins
Born: Durham, North Carolina 1959
painted metal on vinyl and wood
96 x 96 in. (243.8 x 243.8 cm.)
Smithsonian American Art Museum
Gift of Nissan Motor Corporation in U.S.A.
1988.39 Smithsonian American Art Museum
1st Floor, North Wing

(With thanks to Gradual Dazzle.)

This week, you get two for the price of one. First, from Breda:

When you ask a reference librarian how to spell the word “library,” it’s probably best not to argue with her.

And a comment to same, from Tam:

There is absolutely nothing on this planet, from commies to hard water stains, that annoys me as much as somebody who comes to you for an answer, and then argues with you when you give them one.

Entire organizations seem to be built on that practice.

I remember (thank you, John Quincy) a WTMA jingle which noted that the station was #1 by Hooper and Pulse. The old Hooperatings date back to the Golden Age of Radio, but they did pretty much what ratings do today: they measured the audience, and sent the numbers to advertisers, who planned their buys accordingly. Hooper’s methodology was simple: they’d call you up and ask you what you were listening to. (This was, I need hardly point out, way before Caller ID.) Pulse took a different approach: they did face-to-face interviewing, at least during their early days in New York. And both are gone now, Pulse having faded some time during the 1960s — that jingle, adapted from PAMS Series 18, dates from 1961 — and Hooper was taken over by A. C. Nielsen in 1951 and eventually phased out.

Nielsen is still the gold standard for TV ratings, which annoys TV broadcasters, who claim they’re being undercounted because of all those Internet viewers. So they’re forming their own ratings service:

Media participants in the consortium — including networks owned by NBC Universal, Time Warner, News Corp, Viacom, CBS, Discovery and Walt Disney — expect it to be operational by September.

They have pulled in Procter & Gamble and AT&T, the top and third-biggest US advertisers, and Unilever. The involvement of such big names highlights how urgently advertisers feel the need for better information to justify ads that run across multiple media platforms.

If this sounds a little like Fox taking inventory of the henhouse, well, it’s not the first time suspicions have been aroused. From the immortal “Chaos” by Arbogast and Ross (you can hear it here), fifty years ago:

Speedy Clip talkin’ at you from radio station KOS, Painted Radio K-OS, with the Speedy Clip show, the number-one program on the number-one station in the number-one city as rated by the number-one rating service, Numbers Incorporated, owned and operated by radio station KOS — and KOS-AM.

Nielsen will have its own Net-measuring tools in place within a couple of years, we’re told.

I do somewhere around 35-40 posts a week, which is enough to keep the readership from defecting to Crappy Taxidermy, but not enough to cover everything that’s happened recently. Consider this a perfunctory effort to get caught up.

NFL’s Philadelphia Eagles sign Michael Vick:
Dear Mr. Fitzgerald: About that “there are no second acts in American life” bit? Forget it.

Netscape founder Marc Andreessen thinks we need a new browser:
Well, maybe Microsoft does.

Thousands of acres burned in Santa Cruz County, California:
This is horrible by anybody’s reckoning, and I hope they get a handle on controlling the blaze soon.

The Associated Press’s new “tracking beacon”:
Be it noted that I tried tucking a tracking script into my own RSS feed, but dropped it for lack of tangible results after less than 72 hours.

Devon Energy trims its new skyscraper to 908 feet:
The sky was evidently complaining about the scraping.

Doc Searls, with an assist from the Incredible String Band, comes up with a metaphor I must deal with:

For a long time I harbored a fantasy about writing a history of radio, titled “Snow on the Water.” Now I’m thinking that metaphor applies to social media as well. Rather than geology, it’s an ocean over which tweets fly and fall like flakes.

Blogging is geology. Its posts may be current and timely, but they accumulate like soil deposits. You can dig down through layers of time and find them. Each post has a “permalink”. What are links to tweets? Temp-o-links?

Especially in view of this startling revelation:

I’m still haunted by hearing that users get a maximum number Twitter postings (tweets) before the old ones scroll off. If true, it means Twitter is a whiteboard, made to be erased after awhile. The fact that few know what the deal is, exactly, also makes my point. Not many people expect anybody, including themselves, to revisit old tweets.

I have no idea what that number might be, either. Last night I went back through about 800 of my own tweets before realizing that geez, I just went back through 800 tweets. And I’m somewhat flummoxed by the fact that in seven weeks I have put up over a thousand examples of semi-effervescent evanescence, though I console myself with the thought that probably 30 percent of those were generated by WordTwit, which sends up a tweet (and a nice, short URL off this very domain) for every blog post.

Still, all the blog posts, the 6100-odd here in the WordPress database, the 7000 produced before that in Movable Type, and whatever was going on here before that, remain readable in the general sense. (Whether they’re readable in an aesthetic sense is yet to be determined.) And I suppose I could archive the Twitter stuff, were I so inclined, but I can’t think of any good reason to do so. Yet.