And by “things,” I mean this:

This is a one-of-a-kind item, obtained directly from the Minneapolis StarTribune writer, James Lileks, at the 2011 Minnesota State Fair. Lileks, a locally acclaimed satirist and cultural commentator, signed the moist towelette at 12:15, September 2, at the StarTribune state fair booth and presented it to me, an avid fan, in exchange for a pandering testimonial to his writing prowess. Alas, I must part with it, due to financial difficulties, but be assured, it is not easy to do so. This is the real thing, and your only chance to obtain such an article.

You were expecting maybe Juanita’s Fajitas?

Incidentally, Lileks himself vouched for its authenticity, which surely added something to the winning bid.

Not a whole lot going on in Rebecca Black Land; she’s back from vacationing in Cabo San Lucas, and while everyone waits on that EP, she’s set up her own YouTube channel (which, “Friday” being still in dispute, is quite empty for now), and she’s taking questions at a Buzznet blog.

Meanwhile, I scooped this out of her Facebook fan page:

“Going into the studio has been amazing. I just want to prove to everyone I can do it. I’m not some rich kid whose parents paid for her to have success. That’s not me. I want to be a real artist with a real career. The record is coming out so cool. I’m doing a ballad, a dance song with a little bit of a Latin flair to it. And, the lyrics will be a little more challenging. It’ll sound completely different from ‘Friday’ because there’s not a crap load of auto tune in my voice,” laughs Rebecca.

Of course, there were a few people — enough to get it to #58 in Billboard, anyway — who actually liked “Friday.”

And there’s James Lileks, who here discusses with his daughter what might happen if the cereal RB’s gotta have somehow failed to materialize:

“What would befall her if she doesn’t have cereal? She says she has to have it, but that suggests consequences if she doesn’t. Why not a PopTart?”

“It doesn’t fit the lyrics.”

“Anything fits. ‘Bagel, bagel, gotta have my cream cheese.’”

Don’t ask what the young lady formerly known as Gnat had for breakfast.

The Trashmen’s classic “Surfin’ Bird” made #3 on the British charts — in December 2010, a mere forty-seven years after its original release.

How can this be? Sundazed Records, current home of the Bird, explains:

This holiday season, a cadre of British rock ‘n’ roll fanatics — represented by a Facebook group that boasts over 620,000 members — has mounted an audacious campaign that has already pushed the song to the Number Three spot on the U.K. charts, alongside the likes of the Black Eyed Peas and Rihanna. The effort, originally launched by “Birdman Jack,” has achieved this unprecedented feat by encouraging its members to purchase the song.

In a recent statement, the group explained that the campaign represents a concerted effort to strike a blow for real music, and to wrest the U.K. chart spotlight back from the domination of lightweight manufactured pop, as exemplified by Simon Cowell’s wildly successful TV show X Factor. “Our mission,” the group explains, “is to continue the success of last year’s ‘Rage Against The Machine’ Facebook campaign, which snatched the Christmas Number One spot from X Factor. The reason behind this campaign is to further prevent the domination of manufactured music, and to allow something truly great to take the limelight. We are quickly closing the gap on the Number One spot, and we won’t stop until everybody knows that the bird is the word!”

The X Factor entry, Matt Cardle’s “When We Collide,” has one thing going for it: it’s genuinely terrible. Unfortunately, the UK is even more efficient than the US at putting horrible godawful stuff at the top of the charts.

Still, as James Lileks says: Fear the army that plays “Surfin’ Bird.”

(Play it yourself here.)

Instapundit readers Saturday night were treated to the complicated spectacle of Glenn Reynolds quoting me quoting James Lileks.

The subject at hand, so to speak, was the appropriate viewing angle for women’s lingerie. I think all three of us were in agreement that it’s best seen, um, on the floor.

There have been a few somewhat-arguable photos on this site from time to time, though I don’t think I’ve ever quite stooped to this:

I’ve come across another internet tendency that really irritates me: blogs that use photos of a woman’s lower torso and legs, or just the legs, with a pair of panties or thongs down around her ankles as illustrations or headers on their blogs when the subject of those blogs is not “how to keep the elastic in my underwear from failing at a crucial moment.”

Although I have to admit this: upon reading that paragraph, I thought about raiding Lileks’ Art Frahm collection and putting up a blog on that very subject, though WordPress.com was not exactly keen on the idea of “howtokeeptheelasticinmyunderwearfromfailing.wordpress.com,” and I’d have to do a custom header, which means I’d spend more time than I wanted to spend reviewing the handful of themes that they permit. (I do keep my backup blog over there, albeit with stock artwork — with one exception, of course.)

Besides, it’s the men you have to worry about, descending-clothing-wise.

Lileks has seen one too many of these scanner interfaces:

It was designed, as usual, by engineers with no taste who presume Great-gramma is trying to scan something so she can send it by the inter-mails to someone, and needs to be shown in the most obvious way possible that she is old and stupid and should not use computers. Hence it has two icons: one says DOCUMENTS, with a little badge that says “300,” and another says IMAGES, with a badge reading “200.” I assume that means dpi, but who knows? You can make custom profiles, but it never remembers them. There’s no button that actually says SCAN, which would be helpful. It’s as if the GUI team is a bunch of malicious bastiches who came up with the most non-intuitive interface ever, then said “Okay, now let’s add one more step between deciding to scan and actually achieving a scan. Johnson, you’re good at this. What would you recommend?”

“Well, just off the top of my head, I’d say have the default setting for saving put it into some proprietary image-collection program buried deep in the User’s library, so it can’t be found no matter how hard they look.”

“Excellent! Make it so.”

Of course, if you do as much scanning as Lileks — but no. No one does as much scanning as Lileks. He’s the original Scanny McScannerton. He could probably justify an industrial-strength scanner that would make Great-gramma throw up her dentures in despair, but they’d make him pay industry-level prices for it, and I suspect he’d like to feed the family once in a while.

My old Umax scanner was legal-sized, and any graphics program that spoke TWAIN could invoke it. Unfortunately, its speed was decidedly limited — it connected through the parallel port, fercrissake — and it was so old, Umax didn’t even bother to come up with an XP driver for it, so it’s been mothballed for the time being.

Then again, maybe not:

The only way BP could be more hated: if they changed their name to HP and were spilling printer ink into the Gulf. At the current price that would be about a billion dollars an hour, probably.

On the upside, the ink flow would probably stop once two-thirds of the contents had been discharged, or at the very least you’d get a pop-up telling you that you were out.

This has never happened to me, of course, but they say that if your date is rude to the restaurant staff, you should consider the relationship doomed from that point on.

In which case, there are going to be lots of folks breaking up in short order:

Ever worked in a restaurant? I sure have. It’s hellish. People seem to be more piggy than ever when they eat out now. There’s this air of entitlement and they seem to think the servers are subhuman.

You can try to compensate for these miscreants:

I had a nice but very nervous new waiter-dude being “trained” by a female server. The second I was seated I told him what I wanted to eat (just the salad bar), and let him know that he could basically just get me a plain glass o’ water and then ignore me and spend his time dealing with “the difficult people.” He laughed and looked grateful. He was great, the little I saw of him. I didn’t need to see him, though. At the end, I tipped him $5 on a $9.53 tab to TRY to make up for the tables who ran his legs off and talked his ear off, pigged out the table and the carpet around it, and took up all his time asking stupid questions about stuff on the menu like they’d never heard of “a hamburger, with cheese or without cheese” before, and left shitty tips. If you don’t know who these people are, you ARE them.

There is, however, a limit to how much of this you can do:

[W]aiters don’t like ha-ha funny customers, the ones with routines, accents, stock phrases, and three other people who find them hilarious. (Or not.) These are performers. Waiters don’t like people whose humor has an aggressive undertone — I’ll have the horsemeat. Don’t tell me you don’t serve it, I’ve eaten here before.

On the other hand, I remember a young woman in deepest St. Robert, Missouri, spring 1972, who might have been the prototype for Progressive Insurance’s spokescreature Flo. I don’t know how long she’d been slinging hash, but she was eminently capable of dealing with the third-worst possible table occupants: four not-yet-drunk post-adolescent guys. (Identification of the first- and second-worst is left as an exercise for the student.) If she’s still there after almost forty years, today’s Unworthy Diners wouldn’t faze her in the least.

First, a restatement of principles, previously codified as Lileks’ Law of Lingerie:

Let us be frank about the purpose of lingerie… It is not normal clothing. It exists for one purpose: to be, eventually, visible for a very short time. If it is visible for a very long time — and I am trying to be delicate about this — then it is not doing its job.

That said, it must be taken into account that some people do not necessarily endorse this particular worldview. For them, there is this lace underwire bra that comes in five fluorescent colors, which presumably will be worn under something relatively flimsy to a place where the lighting can make it visible for longer than a very short time.

This is, I hasten to add, not something I’ve encountered in real life myself. However, the Shoe Girl, a fashion designer herself, spotted this particular look on an A-list singer/fashionista and was sufficiently smitten by the concept to email the celeb in question and ask “Where did you get these?” Celeb responds, Shoe Girl puts up a blog post, I stare in disbelief for a couple of seconds, and then I put up a blog post. It’s amazing how efficiently this particular process works, even if occasionally it challenges my most cherished values.

Jenn takes note of a couple of Google’s Hot Searches:

eDiets and full body scanners are among the hot searches. Possibly fat people are worried about being scanned.

Not me. I’m not about to subject myself to one of those Shiny Tubes O’ Death, especially now that Underpants Gnomes seem to be the dominant influence on the airline industry.

See also Lileks: “I regard airplanes as morgues with gift shops. As much as my brain knows the facts on flying — i.e., it’s safer than doing some welding while standing up to your knees in gasoline — my heart knows that as soon as I get on a plane, it will erupt in flames for no good reason and I will be paste on the landscape.” Suicide bombers are the very definition of “no good reason.”

Der Kommissar’s in town, but not to worry too much:

[S]omewhere in the 60s we invented the concept of the Cuddly Commie, someone who was either amusingly harmless, a blowhard with a bagful of reheated cliches, or the world-weary literate fellow who was really just as free as us, in a way, and thus an argument for the fatuity of a bipolar world. This idea took a long time to expire, and was last seen in a Star Trek: Next Gen episode, where Picard says “can you believe that people once went to war for different economic systems.” As if that was the small sticking point.

The current version of same — Cuddly Commie, not Star Trek — aspires to world-weary and literate, but quickly descends into clichéd blowhard once he realizes that you’re not buying the premise.

They never quite explain how Roddenberry’s vision of a future without money or religion evolved, or worked, or managed to fill the needs in the human spirit that find manifestation in, oh, things like money, or religion. Trek characters were allowed religion if was based on a non-divine dead guy, be he Surak or Ka’less, but eventually they got old-time religion X 10 with the Bajorans — who started out as sorta-kinda Palestinian stand-ins, but turned into your basic New-Age guys with a priest class and a doctrine built around omniscient, distant god-types who lived in a wormhole and could make anything happen, except granting Avery Brooks the power of personal warmth.

And thus were imagined the Ferengi, 24th-century entrepreneurs incorporating 16th-century Jewish stereotypes. (Well, except that whole wardrobe thing.) Had Shylock survived Venice, you just know he’d be running a Dabo wheel somewhere in the Alpha Quadrant.

I am minded of Quark’s reaction to terrestrial root beer: “so bubbly, and cloying, and happy … just like the Federation.” At least he didn’t say “cuddly.”

I don’t know for certain if Lileks is still getting traffic for this, but I know I am, and if I am, by rights he should be getting twenty or thirty times as much.

Anyway, here’s what he said, which I didn’t quote when I linked to him later that day:

Watching the Simpsons’ “Tomacco” episode tonight, I was struck again by the brief appearance of the filthiest joke ever broadcast on network TV. I’m serious. I think it’s still there because the censors didn’t get it. If you don’t get it, you don’t see anything untoward; it doesn’t have the appearance of naughtiness. But there it is, every other month when the episode’s rerun: a sign on a rural store.

I’ve described the line to smart people, clever people, Men of the World, and they don’t get it, which is probably why it’s still there.

And no, I’m not going to tell you if you don’t get it.

Note: I’ve edited a screen shot into Lileks’ remarks.

What I had to say about it at the time:

I remember watching the episode of The Simpsons in which it appeared, staring in disbelief, rewinding the tape just a smidgen, and staring in disbelief again, followed by “Oh. My. GOD.” It was another ten minutes before I could resume viewing.

(Screen shot courtesy of 11Points.com. They’ll explain it, if you insist.)

Though he try, and he try, and he try, and he try:

I don’t run a big company, and I have no inside know-how on the vagaries of handling customer complaints — Gosh, I bet you get a lot! But I would suggest, with all due respect, that the customer profile database be tweaked somehow so you can see, for your own benefit, that a customer who bought two top-of-the-line appliances has had failures with each one, and tie this information into a repair / failure database. Surely some program could tell you that the cost of satisfying the customer NOW is less than the cost of making four trips to repair the SAME. STUPID. POORLY. DESIGNED. PART, and said customer might buy another appliance, or speak favorably of the experience to others, or refrain from issuing Twitter updates to 10,000 people.

An example of such Twitter updates:

Have been on hold to repair center for 11 minutes because “the system is locked up.” They’re quite upset about. My problem, not so much.

Is it possible that in this age of instant information transmission, the Us vs Them balance is shifting a notch toward Us? We can only hope.

Update: Never underestimate the power of a peeved blogger. Tweeted by the man himself:

The Internet gets results! Electrolux just called, is keen to do the right thing.

Hey, hey, hey! That’s what I say.

Lileks hasn’t been using his iPhone for music much:

a) I don’t listen to that much music when I’m out and about, and b) I was convinced it would drain my battery in 42 minutes. (Factory specs says 43 minutes, but that’s under ideal conditions when you have the volume turned to 1 and you’re playing 4’33″ by John Cage.)

Had I an iPhone, I would so be testing this premise: 4’33″ is these days available from the iTunes store. It’s in three movements, so it’s $2.97 for the download; apparently it’s not available as a ringtone. More’s the pity.

(If you’re unfamiliar with the piece, you must be new around here: I mention it pretty much every chance I get, and I’ll even send you to the video of a live performance.)

The StarTribune has assigned a blog to Twin Cities imp James Lileks, and this is the explanation thereupon:

This blog covers everything except sports and gardening, unless we find a really good link about using dead professional bowlers for mulch. The author is a StarTribune columnist, has been passing off fiction and hyperbole as insight since 1997, has run his own website since the Jurassic era of AOL, and was online when today’s college sophomores were a year away from being born. So get off his lawn.

I guess it’s up to me to fill the sports and gardening voids.

Lileks turns up an old advertisement for Shell gasoline, and the pitch is familiar:

Have you had the misfortune to meet the Engine-Waste crew? They are knocks, slow pick-up, dilution of oil, slow starting, gummy valves.

Every time inferior gasoline doesn’t give the satisfactory performance your money ought to buy, these thieves get into action. Each is responsible for wasted gasoline — Engine-Waste. Each cuts down your mileage per gallon … makes your driving more costly.

It’s hard to see how today’s pitch for V-Power (now with electrolytes Nitrogen!) is a whole lot different.

“I’m tired of people who just want papers to die,” says Lileks, and not just because he works for one:

It is not necessarily a sign of advanced intelligence to wish the end of a community journal. The web can replicate news, but it can’t replicate newspapers.

I’m also growing tired of hectoring lectures from people whose entire career seems devoted to telling newspapers what to do, but who can’t write in a voice that isn’t humorless, tendentious, and filled with self-regard because they saw this coming a year or two before anyone else. If you made these people write newspapers, they’d fail even faster.

I mention this because (1) I have several newspaper guys who actually read my humorless, tendentious, self-regarding stuff and (2) I recently renewed my subscription for another year and would like to get the whole 52 weeks’ worth if possible.

The owners of the Minnesota Vikings want $700 million in public funding for a new stadium. Minnesota doesn’t have $700 million to spare right this minute.

Compromise position, advanced by Lileks:

The state pays $700 million, but we get the team, too. Every play will be put through a subcommittee. Games will occasionally adjourn for a week. The Senate and the House will hammer out a compromise resolution that agrees to pass for 16 yards on the third down, but gives up five yards for a penalty. “I think we have a play we can all live with,” said the House majority leader, signaling an end to a stalemate that had kept the game going for six weeks. The bill also calls for one yard to be distributed to high school football teams throughout the state, provided matching federal funds kick in another two inches.

This would never work in the NBA, if only because there’s a 24-second shot clock: no legislator ever voted on anything other than a pay raise for legislators in less than 24 seconds.

Besides, as those of us here in Oklahoma City spending $125 million to spruce up our $90-million sports arena must admit, it’s a never-ending process, as Lileks already realizes:

Not only are we five years behind building a new home for the Vikings, this means we’re five years behind building the one they’ll want after that. The one with holographic refs and an anti-gravity field in the end zone for really spectacular touchdown celebrations.

And anyway, it’s not like a team from Minnesota is going to flee to Los Angeles or something.

Some time during World Tour ’05 I declared “Surfin’ Bird” by the Trashmen to be the definitive road-trip song: “[I]t’s impossible to ignore, yet you can’t focus on the lyrics.”

Point: Lileks made the effort:

I know it’s a classic, but I can only take about 45 seconds of it. You get the point. Besides, the lyrics contain an unresolved contradiction: we are informed not only the Bird is the Word, but that everyone is aware of this fact. Then comes this: “Don’t you know / about the Bird?” This would seem to indicate that knowledge of the Bird is not universal, as previously asserted. Such a peculiar lapse would make you suspect the veracity of subsequent lyrics, but of course there aren’t any.

Counterpoint: Mark Richardson says:

Take “Surfin’ Bird”, which mashes together two songs by the far-more-respectable doo-wop group the Rivingtons. Like “Louie Louie”, it’s simple, loud, and sloppy. But when you add Dal Winslow’s voice, just so leering, sounding for all the world like a sex fiend on drugs with his tongue hanging out, the generation gap makes more sense. I can picture the button-down authority figures listening to this song and grimly shaking their heads, imagining the bleak future fans of this music would usher in. But they didn’t get it. Winslow wasn’t singing about a dance craze called “The Bird”, he was pointing out this thing that kids felt but couldn’t articulate. “The bird” was code for a new freedom that only mid-century teenagers could understand. There was a whole world behind those two words, a world invisible to parents that would become much clearer as the decade wore on. The “bird,” you know? Papa oom-mow-mow! You know what I’m saying? Sure, sure, I get it. And I do, finally: This must have driven the grown-ups crazy!

It was drummer Steve Wahrer, not guitarist Dal Winslow, who sang it, but Richardson seems to grasp this song on an elemental level: there are truths in the music that mere words cannot describe. Then again, my father, certainly no fan of that rocknroll noise, actually liked this one, which proves — well, nothing really. Still, I have to wonder what “Surfin’ Bird” might be like had it been spawned, not by a Minnesota surf band rewriting a soul group, but by a sensitive singer-songwriter type.

I’d be willing to bet the Star Tribune would never have bumped Lileks off his column had he been, oh, let’s say, a transsexual sportswriter.

I console myself with the thought of, say, Norm Coleman dispatched to Zimbabwe to cover Robert Mugabe — in the Strib tradition, with two coats of whitewash.

Bonus quote from Bill Peschel:

This is like taking a Kentucky Derby winner and having it pull a cart.

Incidentally, the old Star-Journal and Tribune ad Lileks is using for Bleat art this week boasts daily circulation of 400,000. Currently, the Strib claims 361,172. Somehow I don’t think this is going to help.