Some of the real-world financial aspects of publishing for the Kindle, from Rob O’Hara:

Amazon advertises that authors keep 70% of the proceeds from each eBook sale, but that only applies to books priced at $2.99 and above. For us 99-cent bottom feeders, it’s 35%. That means for each $0.99 electronic copy of Commodork I sell through Amazon, I only make 34 cents. Combine that with the fact that Paypal charges .35 per transaction, and you can quickly see I’m not exactly rolling in the dough on this endeavor. All I can do is “pray Lord Vader doesn’t alter the deal further.”

Accordingly, he’s raising the price of the Kindle version to $2.99, while simultaneously, he’s cutting the price of a non-DRMed PDF version from his Web site from $4.99 to $2.99, which leads to some musing on how to deal with aggrieved buyers who paid the higher price:

Option #4: Contact all the people that just bought Commodork for $0.99 on Amazon and ask them to Paypal $2 to the people that paid me $4.99 for the book.

For the record, I have Commodork in its actual dead-tree edition. Cost me something like $20.

While Clark Matthews, whose A/C has been on the fritz, can easily justify referring to this place as “The Gates of Hell,” I must point out here that we got nothing on the PHX:

Years ago, I had to stay in Phoenix for a week during July. The good news was that they were practically giving hotel rooms away. The bad news was that there was a reason for that: no one who wasn’t forced to be there at that time of year would ever willingly choose to go.

When I made the reservation, I asked the clerk what time the weather cooled off somewhat. His answer was, “Around Thanksgiving.”

This week in Phoenix: highs around 105-110, lows in the upper 80s. Last Thanksgiving in Oklahoma City: high 43, low 28, a trace of snowfall.

Rather a lot of automakers — conspicuous by its absence was General Motors — have written to Rep. James Sensenbrenner, R-WI, vice chairman of the House Committee on Science, Space and Technology, supporting his plan to block the sale of E15, which EPA has approved only for vehicles 2001 and newer; the manufacturers say they may void warranties on cars using E15.

Unsurprisingly, corn-belt legislators are miffed by this sort of thing, with, for instance, Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA) grumbling about “overwhelming scientific evidence,” no small amount of which is deposited to his account each and every year.

Dumbest comment, however, emanated from easily-bought — just ask the President — Sen. Ben Nelson (D-NE), who advised against buying a car from one of these automakers: “I’d just buy a different car.”

Sure, Ben. Wait a few weeks and Archer Daniels Midland will buy one for you. Until they offer to buy one for me, though, you can take your precious ethanol and give yourself a Scientific Duodenal Cleansing. I’m sure you can get Chuck Grassley to hold the nozzle.

When I was a kid, I never quite understood all 64 colors in the big Crayola box: what the hell was “sienna,” and why was it burnt? I eventually figured all that stuff out. I finally learned how to do those pesky RGB color codes that screw up the Web for us. (In case you were wondering, the color bars off to the sides are #330000.) Six times out of ten, I can even comprehend an OPI nail color.

But these new paints throw me for a loop:

In a redoubled effort to capture consumers’ attention in the sputtering economic recovery, some paint companies are hoping to distinguish their brands with names that tell a story, summon a memory or evoke an emotion — even a dark one — as long as they result in a sale.

What they do not do is reveal the color.

For instance:

Valspar, which once featured Apricot 1 (all the way up to Apricot 6), now offers Weekend in the Country, a name that might put you in mind of an idyllic getaway or a Stephen Sondheim tune but that will not convey a specific hue. (For the record, it is the color of mud; perhaps not such a great weekend after all.)

On the other hand, mud rooms are trendy these days.

Farrow & Ball’s “Dead Salmon” — “dead” apparently means something like “matte” — has its own modest charm.

Not that I should talk, of course, since my own walls, unrepainted these eight years, are now something like Free Clinic White.

(Via Pop Culture Junk Mail.)

Like there’s a chance I’d get away with that line:

“A well-read pair of pumps,” says Anthropologie of these “Bookbinder Heels,” which practically demand that you check out the detailing on the, um, spine. It says, incidentally, “VOL XII,” which is no indication of size. (Doesn’t come in a twelve. Eleven, yes.) Which means that if you really wanted your shoe size emblazoned on your heel, you’d still have to wear your bowling shoes, which almost certainly don’t have a 3¾-inch heel or any sort of platform, and probably don’t cost $168 either.

(Via this Nancy Friedman tweet.)

It’s been a long time since we had any Maureen Dowd-related material here, but fortunately for me and my need to fill this space, the blogger known as Half Sigma, who has been reviewing the life stories of New York Times scribes of late, kicked off a discussion with this observation:

Yet despite her success, I sense in her a lack of happiness with her life that doesn’t occur with the daughters of more elite parents. The daughters of the elite somehow manage to get married and have children despite pursuing their careers. In contrast, Maureen’s writings seem to reek of bitterness about being an old maid. So even though she appears to be successful, she compares herself to the children of the elite whom she works with and somehow she feels they have something she’s missing. But instead of blaming the elites or her prole parents for her unhappiness, she blames men.

In case you missed it, I offered some thoughts on Are Men Necessary? here.

Half Sigma’s commenter “blah” suggests:

She probably played the field too long in her youth and she was most likely holding out for a rich alpha male. Unfortunately, that didn’t pan out. So she complains about men who are intimidated by her (i.e. make less than her) and she snickers about the extra-marital affairs of rich alpha males in her columns. While she hates conservatives, I would wager she probably hates rich alpha males even more. This is where I disagree with HS. MoDo isn’t unhappy because she’s a striver but rather because she made some really foolish decisions in her dating life when she was at her peak in attractiveness. This woman was so unrealistic in her outlook that she thought she could land someone like Don Draper before she was a household name. And of course, when she became a household name, she was too old.

The trouble with landing someone like Don Draper, of course, is the risk of landing Don Draper.

I could say something here like “She’s only fifty-nine,” but that might seem somewhat self-serving.

Especially since my antipathy toward DST is on the record and all:

Or, as the lovely Goldie Hawn once said on Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In, “I wish they’d move Christmas to July, when the stores aren’t so crowded.”

(Poached from Rand Simberg.)

So I did the WordPress 3.2 installs yesterday, and for some reason I probably don’t want to know, the All! New! Dashboard! informed me that my browser (Firefox 3.6.18, if you must know) was in desperate need of being upgraded.

The coders were at least prescient enough to sneak a small “Dismiss” link into the box, though they could have saved three bytes by simply calling it “FOAD.” It was a closer match to my attitude, anyway.

Laura contemplates the origin of the town in which she lives:

I’d like to know what insane settler walked through here centuries ago and thought “Damn! This godforsaken place is so hot and humid and has such massive, disgusting bugs, I think I’ll build a town here!”

I can tell her why the insane settlers landed in my town: the government was giving away Free Land. (How the government obtained said land, of course, was not mentioned anywhere in the prospectus.)

I should know. It took me nearly ten years to get mine.

So I must congratulate Stacy and Smitty and wombat-socho and a cast of bazillions, for putting The Other McCain over the seven-million mark. And since I’ve gotten a fair amount of traffic from TOM, I hope they keep on rolling up the numbers.

This is singer/songwriter/surfer (yes!) Tristan Prettyman, heading who knows where:

Now the last time I brought her name up, I tossed in her wondrous little breakup song “Madly,” which I still think is great. At the time, she’d just gotten engaged to singer Jason Mraz; it appears that now they’ve broken up, which leaves me wondering if the inclusion of “Madly” on the soundtrack to He’s Just Not That Into You was somehow sadly prophetic.

Well, maybe half the public, anyway.

InStyle has a tutorial on How to Walk in Heels. It’s a topic that’s been covered here before, but what I find interesting about it is about four-fifths of the way through, where they suggest you wear something else once in a while:

Footwear brands like Fit Flop, Reebok and Skechers claim that the specialized midsoles in their toning shoes strengthen leg muscles and improve posture, which could help prevent heel-related injuries.

Of course, if you always wear Fit Flops or Reeboks or Skechers, you’ll never have heel-related injuries, unless you back into a pothole or something, but hey, I’m not the fashion expert around here.

Steve Sailer on “yes-he-did” “no-he-didn’t” Dominique Strauss-Kahn:

[T]he [current] story is that she filed the false rape charge because DSK refused to pay her for her extra special service. Is he just cheap, or had he been under the assumption that the sight of his naked 62-year-old body had filled her with instant non-mercenary lust, and thus her asking for money afterwards wounded his amour-propre? DSK’s worldview of female motivations sometimes seems learned from 1970s Penthouse letters to the editor, the ones that usually began: “I belong to a fraternity at a small Midwestern liberal arts college, and I’d never believed Penthouse’s letters-to-the-editor until one night when I ordered a pizza delivered and …”

Whether this is kinder than Sailer’s previous comparison, which invoked the name of Pepé Le Pew, is left as an exercise for the student.

Willis Eschenbach spots an assertion in Science that can’t possibly be that precise:

In their June 10th edition, in their “BY THE NUMBERS” section, they quote Nature Climate Change magazine, viz:

1,211,287: Square kilometers of ice road-accessible Arctic lands that will be unreachable by 2050, a 14% decrease, according to a report online 29 May in Nature Climate Change.

In other news, there is a publication called Nature Climate Change.

Now surely, if they can call this to the square kilometer, they ought to be able to pinpoint an exact date and time: say, 1 April 2050 at 6 am GMT. Heck, Bishop Ussher was doing that much four and a half centuries ago.

Says Eschenbach:

The idea that a hyper-accurate claim like that would not only get published in a peer-reviewed journal, but would be cited by another peer-reviewed journal, reveals just how low the climate science bar is these days. Mrs. Henniger, my high school science teacher, would have laughed such a claim out of the classroom. “Significant digits!” she would thunder.

I don’t expect to be around in 2050, but I think it’s a pretty safe bet that this guesstimate is off somewhere between 0.5 and two million square kilometers.

TOLLROADSnews looks at the Sam Rayburn Tollway (aka State Highway 121) across the north Dallas metro:

[TX 121] is a typical modern Texan urban highway with the grade separated interchanges for the tolled mainline lanes which are straddled by parallel frontage road lanes. These frontage roads provide access and egress to and from the expressway lanes via simple slip ramps. They also allow untolled trips for motorists who will endure traffic signals at the at-grade intersections with cross-streets.

It might be a little bit more flexible than, say, Maryland’s Intercounty Connector:

The MDICC is a simple 3+3 lanes expressway with two fancy expressway-to-expressway interchange (at US29 and I-95) plus six other simple local diamond interchanges (MD355, Shady Grove Metro parking, MD97, MD182, MD650, Virginia Manor Rd).

Otherwise, these are fairly similar roads, both intended to take some traffic away from existing arterials, both set up for electronic tolling, and neither burdened with river crossings or anything complicated like that.

The Texas road, 26 miles long, cost $1.43 billion; the 18-mile Maryland road cost $2.57 billion. There are several reasons for this disparity, but one of the biggest was that the only question about the Sam Rayburn was who was going to build it in the first place, the toll authority or a private-sector concessionaire. In Maryland, however, the NIMBYs were out in full force, and, says the News, “Build/no-build conflict tends to produce added cost in delay and projects to ‘buy off’ environmentalist opponents.”

Most of Texas’ road-construction workforce is nonunion. By law, none of Maryland’s is.

And there’s this:

The state of Maryland came in with GARVEE bonds (grant anticipation revenue) bonds and an appropriation from general funds for about half the costs of the MDICC so there was much less pressure to contain costs than in Texas where the state DOT and the regional toll authority was expected to fully fund the TX121SRT.

ODOT doesn’t have any big schemes like this on its plate, but they’re still trying to finish the Crosstown Expressway 2.0 before the 3.0 version becomes necessary.

Okay, go ahead and laugh. I might give out with a chuckle here and there. On the other hand, if Toyota wants to bolt some performance parts onto its meek hybrid, who am I to complain?

The Prius PLUS Performance Package starts with a seven-piece aerodynamic ground effects kit that delivers an aggressive and lower-profile stance. It includes front and rear bumper spoilers, sleek side skirts and a uniquely styled rear diffuser. The custom body kit was aerodynamically designed and engineered to reduce the vehicle’s coefficient of drag, maintaining its already great fuel efficiency.

And kudos to the Big T for not claiming, as might an aftermarket firm, that fuel efficiency would go up with a body kit.

Complementing the body kit are race-inspired 17-inch forged alloy wheels. The higher strength-to-weight ratio reduces the unsprung weight, assists in keeping the corner weight down and performance up, while maintaining the Prius’ overall light vehicle weight and high fuel efficiency. The wheels are fitted with low profile 215/45R17 tires and have a custom offset, which increases track width yet maintaining Prius’ low rolling resistance. The attractive split five-spoke pattern with a liquid metal protective finish will keep the appearance looking great.

Base tires on the Prius are 195/65R15, so this is a major change. The custom offset means that aftermarket suppliers will have a problem making sport wheels for Prii, but Toyota undoubtedly sees this as a feature.

And while there aren’t any actual go-fast pieces in the package, there are some handling benefits to be had:

The performance side of the PLUS package delivers excellent traction and handling that will surprise any automotive enthusiast without sacrificing fuel efficiency. The track-tuned lowering springs lower the vehicle 1.1 inches in the front and 1.3 inches in the rear. This enhances the vehicle’s on-road performance through quicker turn-in, enhanced steering response and improved cornering ability. A tuned rear sway bar is added to help reduce body lean for flatter cornering and maneuverability. This helps provide the driver control and confidence while touring, mountain driving or just plain having fun. The sway bar is constructed of high carbon spring steel, powder coated to prevent corrosion and road damage.

Still no irs for the Prius, but space considerations are likely the controlling factor. (Heck, my medium-zoot sedan has a solid beam out back, and you don’t hear me complain. Much.)

I have to wonder if all these boy-racer parts herald a general Manning Up in the industry. Shucks, even the new New Beetle (officially designated “Beetle” without the qualifier) has been reskinned for reduced perceived simper.

As with any other human activity, there are risks involved with visiting a clothing-optional beach: sunburn, getting sand in places where sand ought not to be, and perhaps the most exasperating of all:

It’s usually a man who arrives with no book, no cooler, and most tellingly, no sunscreen. Clearly he intends to stay just long enough to snap some nude photos.

In days of old, when cameras were large and easily spotted at a distance, this wasn’t such a big deal: the “visitor” would be approached and his film would be flung into the sea. This sort of confrontation is discouraged these days, and besides, rather a lot of these places are under Federal jurisdiction, where both nudity and photography are legal.

A friend of mine who visited a beach in Florida this year says she wasn’t accosted by photographers, but she was bothered a bit by one fellow who parked himself in her line of sight and then proceeded to apply SPF 800 to his twig and berries — in increments of 8 or 16 — while utterly neglecting the rest of his person.

I caught this item among the various vintage ads Found in Mom’s Basement, and I pass it on to you:

The late Allan Sherman reworked “Chim Chim Cher-ee” into a satire on American advertising, and referenced the product this way:

“What does that blue magic whitener do?
Does it make blue things white, or make white things blue?”

Your mom knew the answer to that, of course.

Many years later, a band called Blue Cheer would come down with the Summertime Blues.

What do you do when your own personal aesthetic starts to shift? Tavi, four years into the fashion-blogger scene but still barely fifteen, is left with a quandary:

I took this picture a couple months ago, going for some Heathers/Twin Peaks vibes, but started thinking too much about how I look in it and avoided posting it for a while. I wasn’t insecure, quite the opposite — I didn’t want to post this photo because I look good in it. And, as someone whose “thing” for so long has been “Challenge beauty standards! Screw convention! Look like a grandmother on ecstasy at Fashion Week!”, that somehow felt hypocritical.

One of the factors, apparently, was No More Glasses:

Before I got contacts in March, I just never really counted myself in the general pool of people who might be considered attractive. I wasn’t insecure about how I looked, I just made peace with the fact that I wasn’t, to me, an attractive person, and decided to milk my charming personality instead. The glasses were an easy way to isolate myself from even having to consider keeping up some kind of face. Then I slowly came to feel that, well, maybe I did want my face to be visible. Maybe I liked my face. Is that not okay?

Now I admit to having read Style Rookie since 2008. When Tavi crashed the pages of The New Yorker last year, it suddenly occurred to me that omigod, there might be a swan there, albeit still playing those comfortable duckling games.

If I’d been paying closer attention, I’d have seen this on Tumblr:

i think i’m pretty now, at least applied to my own idea of pretty, which for me comes from all the things i really love, all the sometimes ugly books and movies and what i see on the walk to school, and i’m more intrigued by the idea of looking like a reflection of that and internalizing it and feeling like a part of everything i really love. and i don’t even think there is anything very subversive about what i look like/how i dress anyway?

Three months later, the internalization isn’t exactly seamless:

Right now, I could pretend to be an archetype of a feminist superhero and say I never want to be a conventionally attractive person. But, while I have so much respect for the people who can say that truthfully, I’m not there yet. I think it would be, in my case, much more effective to be honest and willing to have this conversation instead of signing myself to a stereotype I can’t fit. I admit to the basic human desire to be attractive. That’s certainly not all I want to be, and I’m not bending over backwards every morning for it, but it’s there.

The question in my mind: is she actually going in that direction, or will she decide that beauty is a form of currency, and work on building a nest egg?

Because there’s something here that doesn’t quite add up:

People who are conventionally attractive have the privilege of going through life knowing their appearance will usually not act as a barrier in accomplishing what they want to accomplish. Of course, this is a general statement, but typically, Pretty Woman does not have to worry about missing out on opportunities because of her appearance. (Pretty Woman also gets Richard Gere.)

There are, I suspect, occupational fields where said PW will miss out on opportunities because of her appearance, because she won’t be taken seriously; Dr. Christmas Jones, the nuclear physicist in The World Is Not Enough, seems decidedly atypical, and not just because she happens to run into James Bond. There’s nothing in the world that says that someone who looks like Denise Richards can’t operate a world-class weapons system, but rather a lot of people are used to seeing a grizzled old man in that chair — and some of them, it’s reasonable to assume, have some emotional investment in that familiarity.

So for the moment I’m filtering this through “She’s only fifteen.” This may be giving her short shrift, inasmuch as I was dumb as a post when I was fifteen, that whole National Merit thing notwithstanding, but I figure she’s got plenty of time, and she’ll have several opportunities to change her mind yet again, should she be so inclined.

A recent dialogue between a teacher and a professional term-paper writer yielded up this warning:

I was alerted to plagiarism by the sudden appearance, in a paper that is otherwise a morass of grammatical errors, of a series of flawless sentences with complicated structures. The correct use of a semicolon is a big red flag for me. As is the use — and often misuse — of specialized jargon or technical language that I’ve not discussed with them in class. Then I type those sentences into Google, and they all wind up being smoking-gun cases of plagiarism.

Hmmm. I get rather a lot of those in the search logs, but examples of misuse seem to outnumber examples of use.

Although there’s still a lot of this:

My favorite case this semester was plagiarism within plagiarism. When I informed this student that I suspected her paper was plagiarized, she said to me, “I got my paper from one of the students who was in your class last semester. How was I to know that she had plagiarized?”

(Via Dispatches from the Culture Wars.)