Better yet, don’t. That’s the whole problem:

I’m still baffled why companies insist upon naming themselves something that is meaningless to their customers, difficult to spell and hard to pronounce. Some leading offenders: Tcho, Vumber, Naymz, Technoganic, Doostang, Motiva, Ziizoo, Fragranza, and Mathnasium. Start-ups and old-school naming firms fall in love with invented names for three reasons:

1. They sail through trademarking because they are unique;
2. the domain names are usually available for $9.95 on Godaddy;
3. people want the ego boost of coining a word.

Invented names are the easy way out but most invented names are forced and unnatural sounding. My #1 head-scratcher is a company called Xobni. What is Xobni and how the heck do you pronounce it? “Zob-knee” is inbox spelled backwards. Cute to the founders. Dumbfounding to customers. If you have to spell, explain or teach someone how to pronounce a name, it’s a bad name.

I was curious about Doostang, which, according to its meta information, is “An invitation only site that ensures all contacts entering the system are trusted by at least one or more members in the network.” Liz Strauss was not impressed:

The invitation … touts the core value they offer, but the rules are that you deliver your value to them before they deliver that core value to you — if they do.

But more serious is the fact that the name has been added to Urban Dictionary, and not as a term that lends itself to flattery. Citation given:

“I had to take a wicked doostang, sorry I am late.”

So far, nobody seems to be making fun of Xobni.

The story so far:

March ’07: Circuit City sacks its most experienced employees in an effort to save money.

November ’07: Circuit City realizes that this wasn’t such a great idea.

November ’08: Circuit City files for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection.

The only aspect of this that wasn’t predictable was the timeframe.

“I never understood why I couldn’t come home,” she had said. “I never committed any crime.”

South African singer Miriam Makeba died following a performance in Italy last night. She was 76 and had been in failing health for some time.

In the late 1950s, Makeba, already a star in Africa, arrived in London, where she met up with Harry Belafonte, who gave her career a boost in the US. In 1960, she attempted to return to Johannesburg for the funeral of her mother, and was told that her passport had been revoked; after she testified before the United Nations about the nature of apartheid, her citizenship was summarily canceled as well. It was 1990 before she returned to South Africa, at the request of Nelson Mandela.

Few of her recordings gained traction in the States: she did an early version of Solomon Linda’s “Mbube,” which eventually mutated into “The Lion Sleeps Tonight,” and she scored a pop hit with the bouncy trifle “Pata Pata” in 1967. I remember a particularly heartfelt cover of Dylan’s “I Shall Be Released,” circa 1969. And she went back to her Xhosa roots (on her father’s side) with the international hit “The Click Song.” In 2005 she went on her farewell tour; this weekend’s performance was a benefit for Italian writer Roberto Saviano, who has chronicled organized crime in his native Naples and has been threatened for so doing. Activist to the last, she was.

If you’re new here, allow me to explain: once a week I sift through the log entries for the 3,500 or so folks who stop by, pull out the ones who arrived via search engines, and then look for the queries that qualify as, well, strange. It’s a nasty job, but somebody has to do it.

does oxygen go with gold filings:  Well, at least it doesn’t clash.

songs about tragedy(death):  Thank you for naming a specific tragedy. Otherwise we’d be here all day.

brian damage pantyhose:  Which is why Brian should buy his own damn hosiery and stay out of your drawers.

62 year olds nice legs in stockings:  You could always wait for Brian to grow up.

statements with no anti-statement philosophy:  Try this one: “For every exception, there’s a rule.”

infiniti i30 won’t accelerate beyond 30 mph:  Check to see if you’re in downtown Austin on a Friday night.

Does chaz love me:  Inasmuch as this came from Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, where I know no one, the answer is probably No.

wtf missile:  A highly-desired quality in ordnance. When it hits, you want them to say “WTF?”

‘don’t start sentences with having’:  Having said that, what do you propose as a substitute?

i hate flin flon:  Have you tried flan?

Neither horseshoes nor grenades are involved, so “almost” doesn’t count. The Thunder actually led this one at the half and were up seven with seven minutes left, but the wings of the 5-0 Hawks proved not to be clippable this time around: Flip Murray went on an 8-point tear, the Thunder never got back on track, and the final was Atlanta 89, Oklahoma City 85.

The Hawks’ workhorses, Al Horford and Joe Johnson, lived up to their reputations, playing more than 42 minutes each. Johnson scored 25 points to lead all scorers; Horford grabbed 12 rebounds and scored 8. Murray finished with 14.

On-again-off-again Chris Wilcox was off after five and a half minutes with a sprained knee; most of the heavy lifting in the middle fell to Joe Smith, who picked up 14 points and 9 boards. Russell Westbrook, given 25 minutes to work, wound up with 15; the Kevin Durant Show produced 20 points and four rebounds.

Neither side really shot that well, the Thunder edging the Hawks 39.1 to 37.2, but Atlanta was better from beyond the arc, converting seven of 17. (OKC got only two of eight.) And the Thunder had a slight edge in rebounding, 48-44. What killed them, though, was that dry spell in the fourth quarter: once Murray started knocking down the points, the Thunder managed no field goals for five whole minutes. Unanswered points are, to put it mildly, not the answer.

Now 1-5, the Thunder will wander up to Indiana tomorrow. The Pacers are a modest 2-3, but one of those two was against the Celtics.

I didn’t get too emotionally invested in the design of the Oklahoma state quarter, simply because I hadn’t been particularly thrilled with any of the state quarters up to that point. In their zeal to capture the essence of a particular state, the designers invariably overlooked the need to capture the essence of the nation that issued those quarters in the first place; the coins are prosaic, parochial, and kind of, well, boring.

We can do better. And we have. Phil Patton remembers the last of the Mercury dimes:

The Mercury speaks of its power. The head leaps out, charged with energy of line, so the suggestions of the mercurial god are apt. The details are crisp; [designer Adolph A.] Weinman even lent himself a logo, in initials overlapped, Dürer-style, in a signature. If coin connoisseurs consider the Mercury dime one of the finest of all American coins, its beauty struck me as a reproach to some recent disappointing coin designs, such as many of the state quarter series or the commemorative nickels and pennies.

What makes them disappointing? Patton says it’s because they’re basically print designs, unsuccessfully translated into metal:

Many of the designs on the quarters would be fine on stamps, but are diminished in metal. There may be a lesson here. In the competitions that once yielded Weinman’s Mercury dime, sculptors brought energy to a staid design language on coins, born of simple engraving. Properly marshaled, the powers of graphic design would help — not harm — coin design. Some of the boldness of the logo and richness of type would be welcome.

If sculptors created the “golden age” of coins, it was not because they made the coins into sculpture, but because they adapted the best of their skills to the conventions and contingencies of coin making. The sculptors had to rein their art in, but they had a tradition of doing so: bas relief, the centuries-old discipline of giving depth to plaques, tombs, memorials and medals.

The new Lincoln penny, due out on Honest Abe’s 200th birthday in 2009, is a prime example: the designers worked in the most complicated detail — you can actually make out young Lincoln’s suspenders — at the expense of inspiration. This, too, would make an excellent postage stamp, but as a coin, especially a one-cent coin, it’s overkill.

In the process of denouncing “mantyhose,” as any rational person would, Fillyjonk lets slip a technical aspect of the, um, garment:

They really don’t cover any figure flaws. “Control top” really isn’t. It’s mainly a discomfort device aimed at preventing you from wanting to eat while you’re wearing it.

As they say in those idiotic Cox Digital ads, “What else don’t I know?”

D-E-A-L-I-N-G?

South Korea’s Hyundai Motor Co has had talks with Chrysler LLC owner Cerberus Capital Management about a potential acquisition of the struggling U.S. automaker’s Jeep brand and possibly other assets, people with knowledge of the talks said on Friday.

The emergence of South Korea’s largest automaker as a potential bidder for at least part of Chrysler comes on the same day General Motors Corp said it was abandoning its own pursuit of an acquisition of its cross-town rival.

Cerberus also plans to restart talks [with] other potential partners, including Renault-Nissan, the sources added.

First, the obvious point: people with no “knowledge of the talks” wouldn’t say things like that.

Actually, Hyundai and Jeep fit together fairly well. Jeep, unlike the other Mopar brands, has a fair amount of brand equity these days, and there’s very little overlap in the product lines: the nascent Kia Borrego is probably the only model that would be rendered superfluous. (Yeah, there’s the Jeep Compass/Patriot, but they were superfluous before there was any merger talk.)

Getting hold of Chrysler’s extensive dealer network might theoretically be useful to Hyundai, which still has a reputation for fast-talking guys in plaid jackets catering to subprime customers. But the advantage goes away if they have to sell actual Chryslers as part of the deal, so I suspect that if there’s any deal here, it will be just for Jeep.

How to dispose of the rest of the company? We know that Nissan is dumping its big Titan truck after 2010, replacing it with a version of the Dodge Ram, and that Nissan will be building two small cars for Chrysler, one a Versa variant for South America and another to be sold in Chrysler’s “global markets,” such as they are. And Carlos Ghosn has long made noises about adding a US-based affiliate to the existing Nissan/Renault partnership. Nissan doesn’t need Jeep, really, since they have enough SUVs for a dwindling market; assuming Jeep goes to Hyundai, Nissan could reposition Dodge as strictly a truck brand — the Viper will be spun off to a third party, the Challenger will run its course, the rest don’t matter — and use the Chrysler channel for minivans (wouldn’t you rather have a Town & Country than a Caravan, even a Grand one?), the aforementioned Nissan-built small car, the successor to the 300 (let us pray), and the occasional revamp of a Renault Euromobile, though this latter might be tricky, since the one Renault that might sell well here, the mid-sized Laguna, could steal sales from Nissan’s Altima, built on the same platform.

A third, dimmer prospect: Volkswagen, for whom Chrysler is already building a minivan. We know VW wants to increase its market share in the States — in fact, they’re building a plant in Chattanooga to take advantage of the relatively-weak dollar. But I suspect they want to do it under their own name, not somebody else’s.

Australians in general seem to be more willing to doff their duds than Americans, and South Australians especially so:

The online nudity poll — run by realholidays.com.au — placed the [Northern] Territory in third position for nuding up, tied with Tasmania. South Australia — where 76 per cent of respondents said they loved going naked — came out on top, followed by Queensland.

And at the other end, so to speak?

The biggest prudes of the nation were those bunch of bureaucrats in the ACT at a mere 33 per cent, followed by rigid Victorians at just under half.

And this startled me:

The revealing poll also showed more than half of nudists across the nation were between 18-35 years, and women were more likely than men to strip down to the bare essentials.

In the US, however, it seems that they’re all guys in their late fifties.

(Disclosure: I am a guy whose late fifties will be here before I know it.)

I was feelin’ so bad,
I asked my family doctor just what I had.
I said, “Doctor, Mr. M.D.,
Now can you tell me, what’s ailin’ me?”

Well, actually, he’s a D.O., but he can generally tell what’s ailin’ me, and apparently he was spot-on with his diagnosis of an infection within a muscle: semi-massive doses of an antibiotic seem to have cleared up the source of the lower back pain, to the extent that I was able to do my usual grocery shopping and minor yard chores without incident today.

Side effects: Pain pills at this strength make me extremely queasy; the antibiotic in question seems to have tinted my teeth a nice autumnal orange. It appears, though, that I didn’t have one of those pesky superbugs that just laughs at treatment with antibiotics, and it probably helps that I take them as seldom as possible.

Once in a while, my daughter-in-law sends out a batch of pictures, some of which get reproduced here. This time around she’s prepared a slideshow, which you can see after the jump.

Read the rest of this entry »

Sometimes the most conservative ideas come from people you’d never think of as conservative.

There will be no traffic-control cameras in Cincinnati, not now, and maybe not ever:

On Tuesday, voters in Cincinnati, Ohio made it clear that photo enforcement is not welcome in the city. A majority of voters approved an amendment to the city charter prohibiting local officials from ever installing either red light cameras or speed cameras. Referendum co-sponsor Josh Weitzman hopes his coalition’s victory inspires other cities. “This election is further proof that people do not want to have traffic cameras,” Weitzman told the Newspaper.com. “Politicians in cities across the country need to take note of this if they plan on getting re-elected.” Cincinnati city council members had been trying for the past four years to install the devices that promised to generate between $2m and $12m in annual revenue. Advocates were stopped in 2005 when former Mayor Charlie Luken vetoed a camera ordinance saying, “Let’s be honest with the public — we didn’t think about this until we came up with a budget problem.”

The push for red light cameras resumed at the end of that year when Mayor Mark Mallory was sworn in. A diverse group of political activists from all ends of the political spectrum banded together to form the “We Demand a Vote” coalition to stop the idea. Members include regional chapters of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), the Republican Party, the Green Party, the Libertarian Party and others. The group received more than 10k signatures on a petition to put the subject of cameras on the ballot before the devices even had a chance to issue a single ticket. Political leaders quickly backed off their support of cameras after seeing public opinion on the matter.

Text of the amendment is here. Proponents of cameras may have a difficult time trying to get around it, too:

Any ordinance enacted prior to the passage of this Amendment that contravenes any of the foregoing is void. After the enactment of this Amendment, the City shall not enact or enforce any ordinance that contravenes any of the foregoing. In the event that any provision of this Article XIV is found to be unconstitutional or impermissibly in conflict with state or federal law, only such provision found to be unconstitutional or impermissible will be stricken, and the remainder of this Article XIV will remain in full force and effect.

Nicely done.

My subscription to U. S. News & World Report runs out this month, and purely by coincidence, so do they:

U. S. News & World Report, long the number three newsmagazine in the United States behind Time and Newsweek, has become the latest US media outlet to abandon print for the Web.

The move to become an Internet-focused publication was announced to U. S. News employees in a memorandum on Tuesday from management of the magazine.

Oh, there will still be the occasional print version:

The Washington Post reported on Wednesday that US News would now only publish once a month.

The Post added that the monthly print edition would also be entirely devoted to consumer guides and not news. U. S. News publishes popular annual rankings on such topics as America’s “best colleges” and “best hospitals.”

Don’t count on that monthly print edition being around long, says Magazine Death Pool:

USN&WR may as well just pull the plug on its print edition entirely because who is going to read a monthly version of the magazine? What a waste of paper and back office resources!

If I have to have a weekly newsmagazine, it’s going to be The Week, which is almost entirely composed of content gleaned from elsewhere; if nothing else, they don’t pretend to be an expert on college quality.

The Jazz never lose at home. (Well, hardly ever: they lost four of 41 last year at EnergySolutions Center.) Ignoring this minor detail, the Thunder came out and scored the first eight points, taking a 10-3 lead early. Utah responded by running off 21 points in a row, and by halftime they were up by a frightening 58-29.

Then it was 60-29, and suddenly Oklahoma City came to life. In the third quarter they outscored the Jazz 34-20; in the fourth, 34-26. Were there such a thing as a fifth quarter they might have won this thing. But all you get is forty-eight minutes, and when they were over the Jazz were still up, 104-97. And Utah had even more incentive than usual: coach Jerry Sloan had strung together 999 wins with the Jazz, and they really wanted to get number 1000 at home before hitting the road. Scariest of all, if you happen to be one of the 29 teams in the NBA who aren’t the Jazz, they’ve now won five straight without ace point guard Deron Williams.

In lieu of Williams, Ronnie Price and Brevin Knight ran the point and dished up 14 assists between them — the OKC total was only 15 — while Carlos Boozer was knocking down 21 points, and Mehmet Okur and Andrei Kirilenko picked up 16 each. The Jazz shot .500 and hauled in 45 rebounds, versus 36 for the Thunder.

Still, Oklahoma City had some serious offense in that second half. The Kevin Durant Show was good for 24 points and five boards; Jeff Green made three out of three treys and finished with 22; Desmond Mason, off the bench, contributed 18. The shooting percentage was 43.2, better than average this season. Russell Westbrook wasn’t a factor: he played only 17 minutes and missed 7 of 8 shots from the field, though he got four-for-four from the stripe.

Sunday night it’s back to the Ford, for a meeting with the Hawks, followed Monday by a visit to Indiana.

Inasmuch as all the Movable Type entries from 9/06 through 9/08 have been imported into this WordPress install, and since most of the search engines have gotten around to getting the new stuff, I’ve deleted the MT archives from that period. My apologies if you’ve bookmarked something therein and can’t find it now.

Incidentally, this seems like a good time to praise the WebFTP client used by my host: it disposed of the entire directory at one fell swoop in less than half a minute. Had I used my usual FTP client, I’d have been at it all night.

Plunger Girl follows up a smutty spam link (or spammy smut link) so you don’t have to:

In case you don’t feel like being harassed by relentless porn pages popping up again and again and again, in the most awkward moments, as a chain reaction to checking out one measly little site, I’ll condense the experience.

Your bold click will lead you into a wonderland of mature delights. You’re here, you’re in Busty Granny Land! You feel like a superstar! A young one, in comparison.

Blinking lights and cascading banners announcing “Slut Movies!” and “Fling.com” provide instant eye candy. But that eye candy doesn’t hold a candle to the flashing breastesses that go from full color to dramatic black and white, full color, black and white, full color, black and white. Tits! Art! Tits! Art!

As you force your eyes away from the display of private, yet public, genitalia, you find strange blocks of text that are as out of place as the stories in Playboy. Porn grannies. Moms having sex with kids. Granny channel hairy mature sex. Pictures of mature moms. You’re confused by the strange structure of some of these phrases, but you get the gist: sex, hair, maturity, kids.

Not that this place is entirely single-minded:

And before you attempt to close your browser for the night, you realize Busty Granny Land has produced a pop-up that defies all pop-up blockers to give you a listing of all automobile dealerships within a 200 mile radius of you.

Just in case you thought Harold and Maude needed wheels, I guess.

Three and a half years ago, I drove the entire length of Oklahoma City’s Grand Boulevard, mostly, well, because I could. I noted at the time:

W. H. Dunn was a landscape architect in Kansas City in the early 1900s, eventually becoming the Superintendent of Parks. His duties in Kansas City, however, apparently didn’t prevent him from helping out other cities in need: in 1909, he developed the first official parks plan for Oklahoma City. One of the features in Dunn’s plan was a boulevard to encircle the city, connecting regional parks in each quadrant. Not much happened on that front until 1930, when the boulevard was incorporated into The City Plan for Oklahoma City, and the process of acquiring rights of way began.

I’d never seen it in print before, but now Blair Humphreys has a copy of the actual plan, in all its yellowing splendor, from the days when we dreamed, and dreamed big. (It took us a while to get back into the habit.)

According to Roberta X, this was found “sealed in a tin below a midden-pile in the ruined USian city of Trento, dating uncertain”:

Most Esteemed Diary,

At Education today in the Sharing, before we ate our beans and rice, we celebrated the 25th anniversary of Dear Leader’s gift of a new puppy to his obedient daughters. The Group-Mother reminded us that it was an example of the importance of sharing (one puppy, two children) and obeying our Leaders, who are more dear to us than than parents and who are leading us to peace and prosperity. After we ate, we shared crayons and colored in pictures of puppies. I didn’t feel very hungry at all. We could drink all the water we wanted because it was special day. The Group-Mother started screaming strange things about poor starving ragged children and the National Service Helpers had to take her away. I don’t know who she was talking about. We got to go home early and Jimi said the Group-Mother was probably going to have to go to Education herself but he’s bad and doesn’t share very good. I think he was trying to be mean about my Daddy.

Before he had to go away to learn how to follow Dear Leader better, my Daddy told me about the puppies he had when he was a boy. I wish I had a puppy. Daddy said they were delicious roasted or boiled. Maybe when we all learn how to share properly, everybody will get puppies. At least once a year.

I’m getting the distinct impression that “Education” in that era is roughly comparable to “Rehabilitation” in Mike Judge’s Idiocracy.

In Denmark, apparently there’s a legal right to skinny-dip:

Bathing on Danish beaches, with or without clothes, is a legal right, according to the Eastern High Court, which has confirmed a decision by the lower courts in a case regarding naked bathing.

The decision means that a couple from Skodsborg just north of Copenhagen, cannot put up a ‘Nudism forbidden’ sign on a beach in front of their sitting room window.

The couple say that they are bothered by naked bathers, who they claim engage in sexual activities on the beach. But the local court in Lyngby decided on June 13 this year that naked bathing, which has been allowed in Denmark for the past 32 years, is still allowed. The High Court upheld the verdict of the lower court and ordered the couple to pay costs.

Presumably the “sexual activities,” whatever they may be, are not included in the legal definition of bathing.