Well, here we go again, trying to find sense and sensibility, or at least something we can mock, in the past week’s search queries. (If you like these, do visit the munchkin wrangler, who does something like this every Monday, albeit with a bit more attention to detail than you’re likely to find here.)

“We cannot expect the Americans to jump from capitalism to Communism”:  Haven’t been paying attention, have you?

touch einstein:  Your best bet might be Bob Einstein, a.k.a. Super Dave Osborne.

eat healthy stay fit die anyway:  Yeah, that about covers it.

typewriter ribbon erotica:  Nothing like a little Underwood in the morning, I always say.

“only socks” finkelstein pictures:  Well, how about it, Finkelstein? You know the drill.

cherubic devilish honesty wet the bed until i was 9:  You weren’t being devilish, or even cherubic. Honestly.

perhaps this is not the best of all possible worlds:  Not if you have nine-year-olds still wetting the bed.

is there a secret code to say at spas in casinos to get sex:  They have spas in casinos? Geez, you learn something every day.

gonads hotdog retard:  I think I’ve just found my new password.

why does diphenhydramine give me the munchies?  Sshh. You’re supposed to be sleeping. That’s why you got the pills in the first place, right? Right?

free beer and hot wings complaints:  Hey, it’s free. Don’t complain.

why women don’t care about cars:  They care. But they don’t appreciate you spending $120 on detailing and then taking them to Burger King for dinner.

ozymandias sated buffy:  ”Look on the slain, ye Scoobies, and despair!”

This is D Grin 27, which sounds like a pet for THX 1138 if they allowed you to have pets, but which is in fact a moccasin by Italian shoemaker Geox. The horse-bit sort-of-buckle is nifty, and as do all Geox shoes, this one keeps the moisture away from your feet by wicking it to the outside through tiny holes in the outsole. It’s black here, but it can also be had in beige, and it’s $124 from Zappos. The Manolo describes these as “sweetly sensible,” which is not at all a bad thing to be.

Once again, I get to repurpose some old content:

About thirty years ago, Dr. Demento associate Damaskas Hollodan unleashed a catchy little ditty called “Making Love in a Subaru.”

It’s still catchy, and you can hear it here. (It’s followed by the late Scott Beach’s monologue “Religion and Politics,” for all you amphibrach fans.) Damaskas also took part in one of the great mashups of The Time Before There Were No Mashups, a collaboration with Barnes and Barnes (“Fish Heads”) on the delightful “A Day in the Life of Green Acres.” This tells me that he’s way ahead of the curve, and just to prove it, here’s actual instruction on making love in a Subaru or other similarly-sized vehicle — and keep in mind, they didn’t have Foresters and Outbacks thirty years ago.

(Latter link found in one of Miss Cellania’s link dumps.)

It’s a rumor, but it’s a rumor that seems to have its winter tires in place and ready to roll:

The scuttlebutt: banks still willing to make new car loans are more so when the make is foreign. The meme has been traveling around for a while by net, got an unsupported mention on NPR this week and spurred me into making a few phone calls. Off the record, wink-wink, nudge, nudge, it’s easy to get you bought on a car from a company not headquartered in Detroit. In other words, the gangrene of bankruptcy has already set in. Now it’s a matter of how far the powers that be let it spread.

There’s some logic to this: cars from a bankrupt Detroit would presumably have even worse resale values than usual — and they were already bad enough to spur GMAC and Chrysler Credit to get out of the leasing business. If there’s one thing a bank doesn’t like, it’s collateral with reduced value.

Still: would banks really want to force the issue? Probably not. If there’s anything to this story, it suggests to me that banks are taking the industry’s bankruptcy as a fait accompli, awaiting only a few legal documents to seal the deal. They might even be right.

This past summer, Edward L. Glaeser and Matthew E. Kahn completed a study called The Greenness of Cities: Carbon Dioxide Emissions and Urban Development. From the abstract thereof:

There is a strong negative association between emissions and land use regulations. By restricting new development, the cleanest areas of the country would seem to be pushing new development towards places with higher emissions. Cities generally have significantly lower emissions than suburban areas, and the city-suburb gap is particularly large in older areas, like New York.

As part of this study, Glaeser and Kahn calculated difference in automotive carbon emissions between cities and suburbs for 48 metropolitan areas, which the Austin Contrarian obligingly converted to gallons of gasoline. As expected, places like New York and Atlanta and Philadelphia had large differences; not as expected, the largest gap was in Nashville.

The two metro areas with the least gap were Los Angeles and Oklahoma City, which on the face of it seems surprising, since L.A. is massively more densely populated than OKC: 8205 Angelenos per square mile (2006 Census estimate) versus 871. But what they have in common, of course, is that each central city is not much denser than its ‘burbs, and that almost everybody drives to get where they’re going.

Dan Snierson wonders about this:

A University of Maryland study suggests that listening to your favorite “joyful” music can be beneficial to your cardiovascular system by promoting good blood flow, while “anxious” music can cause constriction of one’s arteries. Most participants in this study (and granted, there were only 10 test subjects), selected country music as their “joyful” music, while heavy metal caused anxious feelings.

As one who enjoys his fair share of the devil’s music, I was immediately perplexed. First of all, I love nothing more than to unwind with a glass of white wine and a copy of Back in Black. And most times I listen to country music, I find myself getting tense like a cat that you pick up but it doesn’t want to get picked up and then it starts squirming and scratching until you let go of it. But was I gravely mistaken? Every time that I rocked some Killswitch Engage, was I actually rocking myself to death?

I keep two albums on the work box specifically for their cathartic effect: Sir Adrian Boult’s 1967 take on Gustav Holst’s The Planets, and Twelve Angry Months by Local H. Both start out fiercely, run for about 45 minutes, and wind up downright placid. Perfect for when my fits rise to the level of Hissier Than Thou.

And really, if all this were true, shouldn’t Dave Mustaine have died a million deaths by now?

Prepare to get stuffed:

The American Farm Bureau Federation reports that the price for a classic Thanksgiving Day dinner, including turkey, stuffing, cranberries, pumpkin pie and all the trimmings, for a party of 10 will run $44.61. That’s up $2.35 from the price that was revealed in last year’s survey.

The survey shopping list includes turkey, bread stuffing, sweet potatoes, rolls with butter, peas, cranberries, a relish tray of carrots and celery, pumpkin pie with whipped cream, and beverages of coffee and milk.

It does not include the following:

• Driving to Aunt Myrtle’s, since she’s the only one in the family who will still actually cook;
• Listening to Uncle Hal yell at Aunt Myrtle;
• Store-brand knockoffs of Pepto-Bismol.

The Thunder were down two after one quarter, down four after two — and down nineteen after six minutes more. Sound familiar? But this time, there’d be no comeback to fall short at the end: it was a second-half blowout, and that was that. And Philadelphia’s Boo Birds, who had made a brief appearance in the first quarter, kept their cool as the 76ers methodically dispatched the visitors from Oklahoma City, 110-85.

The Sixers, now 5-5, dominated the boards: they had 58 rebounds, 19 offensive, and Samuel Dalembert had 16 all by himself, along with 13 points. Thaddeus Young, who had 25 points last night against Indiana, dropped in 23 more tonight. And Donyell Marshall, waived by the Thunder in the offseason, showed up for seven minutes, hitting two buckets, including a last-minute trey.

Robert Swift got into foul trouble early and was replaced by Johan Petro, who grabbed 12 boards and pulled off four steals. Jeff Green had another whiz-bang evening, with 21 points; unfortunately, the rest of the starters combined managed only 19, and Kevin Durant had 13 of those. The Thunder shot 39.5 percent from the floor, below their uninspiring average. It’s things like this which make you start to miss Chris Wilcox.

Three games at the Ford next week: the Rockets on Monday, the Clippers on Wednesday, and the Hornets on Friday, followed by a trip to New Orleans on Saturday. The high point of the week, I suspect, will be Loud City’s reception for the team that first made it famous.

What with Chad the Elder going into great detail about his 16-percent-plus bump in property taxes this year, I figured I’d work up a breakdown of where my property taxes (which have increased 1.48 percent) are going, as per the official rate scale:

• City of Oklahoma City: $125.46
• Oklahoma City Public Schools: $439.83
• Metro Tech Center: $129.49
• Oklahoma County general: $94.29
• Countywide school levy: $34.70
• County Health Department: $21.71
• Metropolitan Library System: $43.58
• Total: $889.06

If it sounds like the city isn’t getting a whole lot out of this, well, this isn’t their major source of funding: revenue from property tax is used strictly for debt service. The city figures to spend $62.7 million to retire bonds this year, out of a budget of $787.5 million. (By law, they can’t run a deficit. For reference, city population was estimated at 547,274 by the Census Bureau last year.)

You’ve probably by now heard of LibraryThing, in which random folks upload their book collections for the benefit of all. The last time I checked their Zeitgeist page, they reported 548,000 members with 33.2 million books, about sixty books per member.

As of this writing, nobody at Fantastic Toe is yet reporting sixty pairs of shoes. The principle is the same, though: random folks upload their shoe collections for the benefit of all. And their Zeitgeist page is called “Collective Wisdom”; at the moment, they have 308 pairs of shoes on display. (Labels most represented: Stuart Weitzman, Guess? and Steve Madden.) The operator of this site is Dillweed Productions, Inc., which I mention here just because I like the idea of something called Dillweed Productions, Inc.

I’ve been on the same Web host for nearly seven years, so I’m not really in a position to address this question: Do some Web hosts attract more comment/trackback spam than others? Costa says yes:

My Akismet filter would regularly contain a cache of a few thousand comment-spams, with a couple hundred getting caught per day. I didn’t think this was so unusual, even for a fairly small site like this one; in fact, I practically bragged about it.

But in the three-plus weeks I’ve been on HostGator, that Akismet spamhole has steadily shrunk. As of this writing, it stands at 159 saved entries. Maybe a half-dozen are added per day.

Again, there’s no other way to account for this significant drop, other than the switching of hosts.

Hmmm. How much spam am I getting? The current count is 902 for 69 days, which is about 13 per day, but the first of November is a serious outlier: 152 of the pesky intrusions, when no other day has had more than 40. Factoring that one day out, we have 750 for 68 days, around 11 per day; call it 250 for three and a half weeks. A bit higher than his current host, way lower than his previous one.

(Note: The old Movable Type installation, as noted here, is still drawing lots of spam, which of course is landing in the bit bucket; still, it’s on the same host. And I have two specialty blogs on this host. One draws lots of spam; the other gets hardly any.)

I hasten to add that Costa’s host switch was not motivated by spam: he cites “increasingly unreliable service” as the main reason for moving, and he also points out that page rendering is faster at the new place. Still, he seems to have made his case.

I am one of those annoying people who reads every last line on a credit-card statement, so it’s very hard to sneak a change in terms past me, and if I deem it sufficiently unfavorable, I am inclined to fight it.

One of these came in yesterday, in larger print than usual, and I dashed off a letter of cancellation meeting my usual standard for wrath. (Here’s a sample.) I let it sit awhile before signing it, and then decided it would be more sporting to call them on the phone and see if I could talk them out of it, at which I have a success rate of somewhere around 40 percent.

The following events ensued:

• Getting past the obstacles in their telephone system: 2:30.
• Failing to explain things to bedraggled Bangalorean: 1:30.
• Elapsed time between being handed off from bedraggled Bangalorean to annoyed person in (probably) Delaware: How long is the first movement of Mozart’s Prague Symphony? It played almost the whole way through while I was on hold.
• Time before annoyed person in (probably) Delaware told me that those were the terms, and “it is what it is”: 3:00.

So I struck out. The cancellation letter was signed, and will be dispatched pronto. As the phrase goes, they had their chance. I probably should have thrown in a picture of a spider, just for laffs.

The Thunder’s New York story is just like many others this season: down by some enormous number of points, Oklahoma City fought back to within striking distance, but couldn’t finish the job. The Knicks were up by 24 at halftime, 68-44; the Thunder picked up eight in the third and cut the lead to a mere seven halfway through the fourth, but that was as close as they’d get. Final: New York 116, Oklahoma City 106.

Zack Randolph and Jamal Crawford did the run-and-gun as well as I’ve seen in a while; each of them got 29 points, Crawford sinking five of nine treys and Randolph sweeping away 19 rebounds. And both David Lee and Nate Robinson wangled double figures from off the bench. It seemed like the Knicks could do no wrong — except for Quentin Richardson, who fouled out.

For the Thunder, there were some bright spots: Russell Westbrook got his first double-double (19 points, 10 rebounds); Robert Swift got 11 boards in 27 minutes of playing time; Jeff Green scored 16 in the second half, albeit after going scoreless in the first; Kevin Durant, who had been listed as questionable, put in 33 minutes and picked up 23 points; OKC shooting was up to a respectable 47.3 percent, actually a point or two higher than the Knicks managed. But New York ruled from beyond the arc, where the Thunder managed only one three-pointer, and the Knicks knocked down 29 points from the foul line. (The Zackster got 11 by himself.)

So it’s now one and eight, with the Sixers to face tomorrow night. It’s gonna be a long weekend.

Three of the major manufacturers of LCD flat panels have entered guilty pleas to US charges of price-fixing and will pay stiff fines:

Three leading flat-screen producers — LG Display of South Korea, Sharp of Japan and Chunghwa Picture Tubes of Taiwan — pleaded guilty and agreed to pay a total of $585 million in criminal fines for their role in fixing the price of liquid-crystal display panels.

LG is paying the most: a $400 million fine, the second-highest criminal fine ever imposed by the Justice Department’s antitrust division. The largest was the $500 million paid in 1999 by F. Hoffmann-La Roche, a Swiss pharmaceutical giant, for leading a price-fixing cartel in vitamin supplements.

And that price-fixing was reflected at retail:

The Justice Department, in a statement, noted that the price-fixing conspiracy affected screens sold to American companies, and cited three by name: Dell, Apple and Motorola. Those companies, and others, could have the basis for private suits.

(Via InsideTech.com.)

I note with some dismay — or maybe not, since who knows who’s getting these things? — that the old Movable Type feeds, which haven’t been updated since the second week of September when I did the WordPress switch, have been picked up 8000 times this month. This compares with 4500 requests for the current feeds.

Whatever dismay there is, it’s tempered by the fact that there have been roughly 11,000 attempts this week to drop trackback spam on MT entries, all of which were met with failure codes. I’m reasonably certain that the majority of those attempts were made by people bots still getting the old feeds.

When I put up my first seven Web pages, I was astounded to find them indexed in a search engine (AltaVista — remember them?) within ten days.

But that was way back in the spring of 1996, so long ago in Web terms that my available space was measured in trilobytes. Things happen much faster today, notes Dr. Weevil:

Belatedly wondering if anyone else had quoted Kenko’s proto-blogger manifesto, I did a Google search on “Kenko + blogger + Idleness + flatulence”. The first result of “about 93” was my own 11:57pm post, dated (timed?) “9 minutes ago”, which means that Google had it in their database approximately 25 minutes after I posted it. I would be less impressed if I had even 0.1% of (e.g.) InstaPundit’s traffic.

According to the last figures on Analog, fully 2.09 percent of file requests at this site are made by the Googlebot, scraping its way through the recently-thinned archives.

(Disclosure: Based on this week’s SiteMeter numbers, I have 0.17 percent of the Instant Man’s traffic. Surprises me, too. I wonder how many people get his feed.)

Kate Winslet isn’t wearing much of anything in this month’s Vanity Fair, and the British press are absolutely convinced that the photos have been seriously mucked with. The Daily Mail complains:

What is especially remarkable about the image, from Vanity Fair magazine, is that it barely looks like Miss Winslet at all. Professional airbrush artist Chris Bickmore believes it has been doctored wholesale. [Bickmore says:] “Her back and lower body have been pinched in to make her look thinner and to give her some curves.”

And the Telegraph‘s expert opines:

The first place to look is under the eyes, because whether you’re two or 92 you have darkness there, and the pictures of Kate have none. There’s certainly no sign of acne either. It definitely looks like there has been a bit of work done.

V. F., for their part, issued the following statement:

Kate really did look fabulous and hardly needed any retouching at all. Just a little smoothing of the skin tone and covering of blemishes. There was no change in the body shape. She really does look that hot.

I’m inclined to believe V. F., if only because they obviously don’t go to any trouble to edit James Wolcott, who needs it a hell of a lot more than Kate Winslet ever did.

Several to mention this time around.

Jim Treacher explains Andrew Sullivan’s Sarah Palin obsession:

Sullivan hates her because she’s obviously better at making a man happy than he is.

T Town Tommy wonders about the priorities on the International Space Station:

What kind of sadist engineer would put humans on a space station for ten years without a refrigerator? Imagine being stuck in a studio apartment for months with an ice chest.

GreenCanary vows to make her compulsive-cleaning habit bearable for her boyfriend:

Since I can’t seem to stop my crazed cleaning and tossing of Mr. Mystery’s things, I’ve decided to modify my approach so as to decrease his level of pain whilst doing so. From here on out, all cleaning and tossing will be done while naked. Or mostly undressed. This will accomplish two things:

1. More boobies = less aggravation for him; and
2. More boobies = less chance he’ll notice I threw away his favorite pair of pajamas.

There are some things you can’t do in the classroom, notes Nathan:

I was a substitute teacher at my high school for three days, until I told a student I was going to rip out his rib cage and wear it as a hat. Turns out they frown on that sort of thing.

Finally, Morgan Freeberg gets to the heart of gun control:

To me, there is absolutely no logical reason to support gun control. It isn’t that I have a huge gun collection, or even that I like guns that much. It’s that, if you favor even “common sense” gun restrictions, you’ve missed an important point about what it means to be an American. You’ve revealed a sympathy for centrist authority that is quite incompatible with the intended spiritual underpinnings of our nation.

Consider the gamut run.

Received from “Fluffy, Lagos Cat Pound, Nigeria”:

Dear Friend,

I am Fluffy, the favourite kitten of the late president of Nigeria. As you know my late master was very very rich man and he left me all his tuna. But, as kitten, I not allowed to have fridge of my own.

My good friend, there are many many fishes and without more fridges tuna go bad. I eat as many as I can but I small kitten and much sick. So I write you, my very good friend, as your name well known in Nigeria as godly person with many fridges.

If you help store my tuna I give you 20% (TWENTY AMERICAN PER CENTS) of each fish — including heads.

Please be writing back soon. Weather hot and there are many bad cats looking with the eyes at my fishes.

Your good friend,

Fluffy

Fish heads. Eat them up. Yum.

(Via Fillyjonk.)

Melody Wells writes the obituary:

People enjoyed watching Britney Spears slowly kill herself over and over and over again for a while. But when our country enters the Depression 2.0, people will actually start to crave real news again.

At that point, all the media agencies will be suffering from a dearth of cash, as well as talent. They will have laid off all of the intelligent, thoughtful, analytical reporters in exchange for cheap college grads ready and willing to give up their personal lives for a byline, but with nothing of value to offer an organization. You won’t be able to adequately report on anything of substance.

“Substance” is open to discussion, but “adequately” seems inarguable: the trend is to shorter, snappier pieces which may or may not actually cover the matter in question but which fit better in the smaller news hole in The Daily Machine.

This is why readers have been slowly leaving print for the past 10 years or more! But big media companies don’t get it. Their relentless pursuit of the bottom-of-the-barrel readership (opportunistic, as it is) has alienated the only dedicated loyal readers they had.

Media bias, as so incessantly decried by the dextrosphere, is merely a segment of that pursuit, the segment that says “We must become relevant!” It stops there, though: they don’t ask “To whom must we become relevant?” They’re using the term in its old Sixties-buzzword sense, inclusive to the point of indiscriminate, and utterly meaningless to anyone who survived that era with his sense of propriety intact.

We’re rapidly entering a period in which the 4th Estate will cease to exist. Everyone’s blaming the Internet. But it’s not their fault. Instead, newspapers and magazines attempted to compete with the internet, entering a race with bloggers which by definition could not be won except by giving up their self-worth. They stopped breaking news. They stopped caring about expertise. They underestimated their consumers.

And that is why print is dead.

Ms Wells is presently accepting a buyout from Time Inc.; I suspect she’ll land on her feet.