It seems like a good time to put up a picture of Angie Harmon, who when this site started was still on Baywatch Nights.

(Click to embiggen. You know you want to. Picture snagged from fan site angieharmon.nl.)

As seen here:

Take heed, blackhearted reactionaries of international blog non-linking, for this is your final warning! All those who foolishly refuse to contribute to peaceful blogospheric cooperation through trackbackery will taste the hot sting of Iowahawk’s radioactive weapons of singlehearted unity!

If this doesn’t work, blame TypePad. I plan to.

Gear Live reminds you that iTunes may not be used as a weapon or as a component of same. From the most recent EULA, under “Export Controls”:

You also agree that you will not use these products for any purposes prohibited by United States law, including, without limitation, the development, design, manufacture or production of missiles, or nuclear, chemical or biological weapons.

So if you’re planning to force a dictator from his hidey-hole by playing loud music at all hours, take note: Steve Jobs does not approve, and he might just take away your iPod.

(Suggested by this Fark thread.)

On the 16th of April, 1996, France Télécom, not yet privatized by the French government, set up an Internet portal at wanadoo.fr. At the time, I’d already been on the Web for a week.

Now Wanadoo is gone, replaced by orange.com, but I’m still here after thirteen years.

It occurred to me some time last week that I have one person on the blogroll who wasn’t even born when I started out. And I’m pretty sure that when I put up Vent #1, I wasn’t even coming close to envisioning Vent #624.

It took almost three years to push the counter over 6,000. Today it’s at 1.7 million, not counting people who just read the feed. I am grateful to the regulars, who make this more of a joy and less of a chore, and to the search-engine drive-by types, who make Monday mornings a tad funnier. (“Strange search-engine queries” dates back to September 2005; there’s even an explanation of sorts in the comments.)

And now, back to the Same Old Stuff.

For two weekends only, CityRep and UCO team up for Zombie Prom. Set in 1950s Enrico Fermi High, Zombie Prom is the story of a love between two students, one of whom is still alive, and you can’t get much more high-concept than that.

Lots of spoilers here.

Thunder radio guy Matt Pinto questioned the sheer number of fouls called on Oklahoma City at the Pepsi Center, noting that Denver put up 36 free throws, making 30. On the other hand, you have to figure that if there was that much going on, the Thunder had to be getting physical, something they haven’t been doing consistently, and in the end they were simply overrun, the Nuggets earning a sweep of the four-game series with a 122-112 win.

Then again, OKC made 25 of 29 from the stripe, .862 versus .833, so there was plenty of banging around on both sides. Rebounds were even at 40; the Nuggets shot a little better (53.8 percent to 47.1). What Denver really did well was to force turnovers: they got 13 blocks (seven by Chris “Birdman” Andersen) and 11 steals, versus 6 and 9 for the Thunder.

As always, the major threats were Carmelo Anthony (31 points) and Nene (23 points, 10 boards). Chauncey Billups rang up 18 points, 16 in the third quarter when the Nuggets started pulling away; both J. R. Smith and Linas Kleiza managed double figures from off the bench. From beyond the arc, Denver hit six of 17.

Kevin Durant put together a 31-point night, with Jeff Green adding 24 and Nenad Krstić 17. Russell Westbrook got his ninth double-double, 14 points and 11 assists. OKC made 5 of 12 treys.

Overall, a decent showing, but still an L, the 57th of the year. There’s one home game left, against the Bobcats; the team finishes with a three-game road trip.

Well, not really. But play along with Francis W. Porretto here:

1. Michael Anthony (if you’re too young to remember the old TV show The Millionaire, look it up) has come to your home and offered to buy you the car of your choice, no matter what that car might be or cost. But there are conditions:

• It has to be in current production;
• You have to foot all running and maintenance expenses;
• It will be the only car you’ll get to drive or use in any way for the next ten years, no matter what happens, where you might need to go, or why.

What would your choice be?

2. Defend that choice, with specific reference to your circumstances — and remember that you’re not allowed the use of any other car, including that of your spouse if you have one.

3. Now describe a set of circumstances you could plausibly face in which, no matter how carefully you chose your new car, you’d rather have some other car for those conditions.

Under present-day circumstances, I think I’d opt for Infiniti’s small crossover, the EX35. Justifications:

• It’s essentially a wagon version of the G sedan, a highly-covetable little darb in its own right;
• It still drives like a G, apart from a couple extra inches of height, separating it from the general run of SUVs that aren’t really SUVs;
• It should fit nicely in my existing garage;
• Operating expenses would likely not be much different from what I’m spending now on Gwendolyn. (The EX will burn a tad more fuel, but most repairs will be covered under warranty for four years.)

The EX is not a particularly good off-road vehicle, though, so were I to move way out into the sticks, I’d be better served by something with more rock-hopping capability.

Vintage 2009: the Commodore 64 Laptop.

Your 38,911 BASIC bytes were never so spiffy.

Suddenly I have an idea, based on this perfectly-rational musing: try to come up with the maximum-length Twitter tweet (not to be confused with Swisher Sweets) with the fewest number of actual words but which still makes some sort of grammatical sense. (For instance: if you come up with ten 13-letter words, plus closing punctuation, you have 130 + 9 spaces + stop = 140.)

Please don’t floccinaucinihilipilify this idea until you give it some thought. (And “Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo” falls short, alas.)

At first I thought she was talking about dinner, but a couple more words clarified the matter: Meat Loaf, said Trini, had appeared on this week’s episode of House, and what’s more, he had been billed as “Meat Loaf Aday.” His real surname, I noted, though to me (and to at least one wag at The New York Times) he’s always been Mr. Loaf.

Seeking something resembling Final Authority, I checked iTunes, where I have him listed under the M’s; the IMDb lists several alternate names, including “Michael Lee Aday,” “Michael Meat Loaf Aday,” and “Marvin Aday.” The title song to Loaf’s 1983 album Midnight at the Lost and Found, cowritten by Loaf, has that credit listed at BMI as “Aday, Michael Lee.”

In view of the above, I’m thinking that the big guy should pull a Shyamalan and declare himself “M. Loaf Aday.”

Anyone who’s messed with Google AdSense knows the threshold: you don’t get a cent until you pass the $100 mark, after which remittances come monthly.

I, for my part, misunderstood this process: I thought you only got paid again after you’d rolled up another hundred. Admittedly, I have never carried AdSense, so I have at least some excuse for this particular misapprehension. And besides, it’s consistent with music-industry practice:

Up until the last quarter, if a songwriter earned less than $50.00 BMI wouldn’t issue a check until the amount owed exceeded that minimum. Now they have raised the minimum amount to $250.00, FIVE TIMES THE AMOUNT IT WAS A FEW MONTHS AGO, before they issue a check!

Are they crazy? Yeah crazy like a fox, it sounds like someone in accounting came up with this brilliant idea to hold onto millions of dollars of the songwriters diminishing royalties for as long as possible … and who’s going to complain?

Most songwriters who are affected by this are too old, too tired, or too stoned to fight for what is rightfully theirs … so they let it slide.

So far as I can tell, this is an effort by BMI to avoid cutting checks at all and shift everyone to direct deposit of royalties earned. (I have no idea what the ASCAP rule is.) Still, a lot of BMI oldtimers are going to wonder if maybe they’re not getting anything anymore.

Last I looked, the royalty was 9.1 cents per song, or 1.75 cents per minute, whichever be greater, per copy.

The Spurs, evidently sick of losing to the Thunder, kicked up the defense a notch and evened up the season series at 2-2 with a 99-89 win at the Ford Center, San Antonio’s 50th win, a figure they’ve reached every year since 1999-2000. The Spurs, trailing by seven after the first quarter, struggled to a one-point lead at the half, and gradually pulled away from Oklahoma City, executing with precision in the waning minutes while holding the Thunder to 17 fourth-quarter points.

Both Tim Duncan and Tony Parker recorded double-doubles, Duncan with 25 points and 15 boards, Parker with 21 points and 10 assists. Roger Mason filled the Manu Ginobili-sized hole nicely, logging 13 points; Drew Gooden got 20 from off the bench.

The lethargy the Thunder seemed to exhibit in the last two contests was less in evidence tonight: OKC shot a respectable 45.3 percent and nailed six of nine treys (three of them in a row in the first quarter). San Antonio outrebounded the Thunder, but only slightly: 43-42. But the Spurs blocked seven shots, Duncan knocking away three of them, and San Antonio committed only 13 fouls all night. The official Kevin Durant counter reads 24; Jeff Green had 16 points, Thabo Sefolosha 13, and Russell Westbrook 10 (with three steals).

Tomorrow night in Denver, and the Nuggets have won seven straight. This may not be pretty.

Morgan Freeberg has a nice little comic rendering of Sarah Palin, but I like this one better:

She stands between Barack the Barbarian and the Treasure of Stimuli.

No, really.

(Via Webutante.)

Well, not completely, but the Blue Oval boys have rid themselves of almost $10 billion worth of debt:

On March 4, 2009, Ford and Ford Credit announced the major components of a comprehensive debt restructuring: (1) a conversion offer in which Ford offered to pay a premium in cash to induce the holders of any and all of the $4.88 billion principal amount outstanding of its 4.25% Senior Convertible Notes due December 15, 2036 (the “Convertible Notes”) to convert the Convertible Notes into shares of Ford’s common stock (the “Conversion Offer”); (2) a $500 million cash tender offer by Ford Credit (the “Term Loan Offer”) for Ford’s senior secured term loan debt (the “Term Loan Debt”); and (3) a $1.3 billion cash tender offer (the “Notes Tender Offer”) by Ford Credit for certain of Ford’s unsecured, non-convertible debt securities (the “Notes”).

The second and third items are mostly bookkeeping items between Ford and Ford Credit, but the conversion offer paid off big: $4.3 billion worth of notes were redeemed, and at settlement Wednesday Ford will fork over 468 million shares of common stock (which went up by 16 percent Monday) plus about a third of a billion in cash.

The reduction of debt, $9.9 billion in all, will save the company about half a billion dollars in interest per year; at the end of 2008, Dearborn was $25.8 billion in the hole, so this is a decided improvement in their position.

And an attorney working on the project commented:

“It is refreshing to see a company doing something without the government, and not going to the government and waiting to be bailed out,” said Michael Kaplan, a Davis Polk & Wardwell lawyer who worked with Ford.

They’re not out of the woods yet, but it’s a start.

The last two times I posted about something Mrs. Obama was wearing, I picked up more than fifty comments, so I figure I may as well work this trend. And this time it’s something I actually sort of like, from her March Vogue cover story:

Yeah, yeah, I know: J.Crew. She plugs them a lot. Then again, despite the oh-so-serious facial expression, she seems more comfortable here than she does in some of those pricey designer duds.

(Seen at Suzette’s, alongside a note to the effect that Jackie would never have sprawled like that.)

From the “I never even thought of that” files:

So we are just a little alot addicted to playing Wii Sports Golf, but here’s a conundrum for you. How well I play all depends on my bra choice — seriously!

If I wear the my “push ‘em up and in yer face” bra, then I slice it strongly to the right and nothing will stop it!

But if I wear my “slung lower and minimised” bra then I hook it slightly left, but with a bit of maneuvering I can lessen it!

However without doubt my best performance is “sans” bra, straight as an arrow every time!

I have got to start paying more attention to the LPGA.

Jaci writes to whoever’s running the morning shows on commercial radio:

I understand it’s 7 am and no one wants to be driving to work in the cold. I see their grumpy faces every morning in my rearview (oh, wait, that’s me checking my eye makeup) and they barely stop for the Beauty School students crossing Main Street with funky orange hair (yeah, that was me again — my heel slipped off the brake). I know you’re supposed to put everyone in a great mood — or at least top their Corn Pops breakfast.

But your morning shows SUCK. Can Bubba tell the kiss of a man? Can a transvestite do a backflip into a split in heels?

Do I look like I care?

It’s 7 am and I have a three year old in the car. Do you have to talk about sex and transvestites and hookers every freaking day? Here’s a thought — PLAY SOME MUSIC.

Occasionally people are puzzled when they hear that I pour a three-digit sum (well, a low three-digit sum) into public radio each year. Perhaps this explains why.

“What’s that bird?” you wonder. Just ask the iPhone:

I’ve been fumbling through my Audubon Society Field Guide to the Birds of California trying to identify all our birds, but it’s hard to match a bird that flitters by to a static small picture. So I bought the most amazing iPhone Application ever. It’s called iBird Explorer. Not only does it let you search for birds by color, size, habitat, flight pattern and similiarity (is it gull-like, eagle-like or wren-like?) but once it finds your bird, it pulls up several pictures as well as the artist’s rendering that you find in most bird books. That’s in addition to a wealth of information on feeding, habitat, behavior, etc.

And does it work better than, say, the expurgated version of Olsen’s Standard Book of British Birds (the one without the gannet)? You betcha:

[B]y far the best feature: it has a function that allows you to hear the actual call of that bird. So loudly, so accurately that the real birds will actually follow you. Believe me, I tried it. Once I identified the little red birds that fly around our barn as Rufous-Crowned Sparrows, I started playing their song. Yup, that was the clincher. Same song. I played it out under the barn eaves and they started swarming me. I wasn’t even wearing red.

This is even cooler, I think, than an iPhone-controlled supercar — unless, of course, you can get other cars to follow you around.

What’s the tradeoff when you buy “green” products? If you’re lucky, a few cents on the dollar. Some folks aren’t quite so lucky.

So I’m walking past a trash can, and there’s one of those Styrofoam lunch containers, and chiseled neatly into the lid are the letters CFR.

Which, of course, made me wonder why the Council on Foreign Relations was ordering food to go.

I blame [fill in name of suitable Rockefeller].