Blogger vs. WordPress shows up all the time on Yahoo! Answers, and I try to answer based on what I think the asker’s criteria might be. If what they want, above all else, is Spending No Money, I send them to Blogger, on the basis that I don’t want to have to explain why WordPress.com might cost them a few bucks now and then, and a self-hosted WordPress will cost them quite a few more.

On the other hand, if the choice is between Blogger and a self-hosted WordPress, I need only point them to this presentation by local designers CooperHouse, which considers ten criteria, six of which favor WP, three Blogger, and one that’s a wash. (Disclosure: CooperHouse’s own site runs on WordPress, though it’s a custom design rather than a standard theme.)

On the question of search-engine optimization, they give the nod to Blogger, on the following not-unreasonable basis: “Google indexes Blogger within 24 hours; Google indexes WordPress within 4 weeks.” Inasmuch as Google owns Blogger, the stuff’s presumably right there for them to grab. On the other hand, I’ve beaten that 4-week period for WordPress by three weeks, six days, twenty-three hours and forty-six minutes, though I’m in no position to say whether this is at all typical.

Maybe it’s just me, but I find this particular question risible:

Most objective and bias-free media outlets? (Does one exist? XD)?

Hi, my ip address was banned by CNN for speaking the truth. I am now looking for a bias-free news outlet. Any recommendations?

Now what are the chances his definition of “bias-free” is “agrees with me”? I mean, you have to be pretty damned bilious to get yourself banned by the likes of CNN. (And “speaking the truth” in a comment section of a news site, I suspect, equals “posting endless strands of copypasta.”)

And come to think of it, if there existed a site that agreed with him in every particular, what on earth would be the point in contributing to it? Is the echo chamber not loud enough or something?

Now here’s a question I couldn’t resist:

Someone voted this up for me:

As I have arguably one of the most random blogs on earth — more than sixty categories, nearly 10,000 tags — I have to say that it’s not been detrimental for me. I average a bit over five posts a day, and seldom will any two of those five be on the same topic.

Truth be told, I’d love to get those tags down to about 7500 or so, but there’s no really good way to update them in bulk.

The really neat thing about those “try before you buy” rental stores is that by keeping the payments “reasonable,” it’s possible to sell, for instance, a $500 computer for $1300.

I would not have thought, however, that this premise was extensible to automobile tires:

RIMCO, a division of Atlanta rent-to-own furniture and electronics company Aaron’s, started in 2004 as a destination for drivers who wanted to pimp their rides with trendy wheels. But as the recession reduced customers’ demand for pricey rims, the company looked for other things it could sell that would keep shoppers coming back time and again.

The answer seemed obvious: tires.

And the targeted customer seems obvious: the douchecanoe who’s just inflicted a brand new set of 22s on a poor, defenseless Chevy Impala, and only then figures out that his old half-bald Walmart Chinese-import rubber won’t stretch six inches to fit. You can find half a dozen people like that any day on Yahoo! Answers.

(Via Autoblog.)

Haters, as the phrase goes, gonna hate. This point-blank question showed up on Yahoo! Answers: “Can someone tell me why the **** Rebecca Black was in the Grammy Awards?” This surprises someone? Whether anyone believes it or not, she is part of the music industry these days, and one of the less exasperating parts at that; it’s not at all hard to believe that someone got her added to the invitation list. And besides, by now she does red-carpet stuff pretty well. I’m not expecting the ten points for Best Answer, but I call ‘em the way I see ‘em. (Photo at right by Andrew Evans/PR Photos, shrunk and cropped to fit this format. Larger version here.)

Did I say “part of the music industry”? William Patry’s book How to Fix Copyright (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011) acknowledges her existence and proclaims her outsider status:

Creativity by the Great Unwashed is said not to be creativity at all, and if permitted, the large corporations who manufacture superstars argue, such platforms will crowd out quality works — that is, superstars’ products. Superstars themselves come to believe in the marketing hype. In a statement that defines irony, the Walt Disney-created product Miley Cyrus dismissed thirteen-year-old songwriter and performer Rebecca Black (whose song “Friday” achieved a worldwide audience thanks to YouTube) by claiming, “It should be harder to be an artist. You shouldn’t just be able to put a song on YouTube and go out on tour.”

Inasmuch as RB has exactly one-third of a writing credit (for “Person of Interest”), I think it’s probably too early to characterize her as a songwriter, though I’m willing to bet it’s just a matter of time. (She’ll be 15 in June.) And anyway, whatever Miley said seems to have been taken completely out of context. Still, Patry is quite correct: if there’s anything any industry hates, it’s outside competition.

Judging by the anguished cries I hear on Yahoo! Answers day after day, many people are not aware that their visits to Web sites are recorded in server logs, and that when they visit major search engines like Google or Bing and then proceed to search results, their search strings are incorporated into those log entries. Good thing they are, too, because otherwise I’d be scratching around for a topic every Monday morning.

(Two-point penalty for “Since when is Bing a ‘major’ search engine?”)

how to draw an anvil:  Start with a picture of yourself plummeting toward the ground. Sooner or later, Bugs Bunny will come along, erase your parachute, and draw an anvil over your head.

wile e. coyote breakaway mug:  Free with the purchase of an anvil, while supplies last.

how to put a ford contour into gear:  There’s a lever for that, right between the front seats.

“invisible staples”:  And Office Depot never figured out why their customers were vanishing.

last friday night two people died:  They stepped into a place where they thought they could buy copier paper, and were immediately shot into the Phantom Zone.

zooey deschanel is not a nerd:  How about “dork”? You like dorks, don’t you?

neon sports bras target:  Presumably they’d be easy to, um, spot.

phishing amazon canceled:  The only way you’re ever going to stop phishing is to charge for outgoing email. Not even Amazon can afford that in any quantity.

what happened to dream academy mattresses?  You can still find them in some northern town.

victoria’s secret employee:  There’s only the one, and you’ll never be able to find her when you’re ready to check out.

explain on “man smart woman smarter”:  Only a man would ask that.

Why is this person even breathing? (Never mind driving.)

The answers, at least, have been suitably rude.

I am not one of those people who believes that Prius owners, as a group, are necessarily smug. However, I’m hard-pressed to come up with any other adjective for this character, and not because he drives a Prius either:

The KBB value of my car went WAY down…WTF!!!?

A few months ago I checked the KBB value of my 2006 Toyota Prius and it was valued at $18,500. I just checked now and it is valued at $15,000. Is this because the new 2012 models came out? This seems like way too much of a decrease. What happened?? It has nothing to do with the mileage, options or zip code.

Now why would someone be checking in regularly with Kelley Blue Book for the same damned car? There’s no indication that he’s thinking of selling it, which is the only practical use for the number, so what we have here, apparently, is an example of Smugfuckery In Action: he wants people to be impressed with how much his six-year-old car is worth. I’d suggest that he drive off a farging cliff, but I’d be willing to bet his estate wouldn’t get more than twelve grand for the car.

Oddly enough, it says “Society & Culture” at the entrance.

Once in a while, I will answer Rebecca Black-related questions on Yahoo! Answers, on the (mostly) honorable basis that I’ve already looked all this stuff up myself, and hey, why shouldn’t I share? Besides, the amount of misinformation being circulated is positively (or negatively) staggering; there was a brief flurry of suicide references earlier this month.

I was not, however, prepared for this: What does God think of Rebecca Black?

Several answers came in, but I seemed to be wandering in the desert. Then, just as I was about to give up in despair, a book arrived at my desk. The Last Testament: A Memoir by God [with David Javerbaum] (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2011) actually addresses the question. From 1,400 Years of Sanctitude 22:14:

I have gleaned much from Numa Numa Guy; I have rolled my eyes at “Double Rainbow” (though I appreciated its numerous shout-outs); I have reeled in horror at 2 Girls 1 Cup, and I have seen Rebecca Black do her level best to help remove the phrase “Thank God It’s Friday” from the popular lexicon.

Which, you may be certain, He approves. Same book, 3:8-9:

The worst is Friday, for that is the day I am forced to hear myself endlessly and mistakenly thanked. Thank not me; thank Frigg, the Norse goddess of love, ye unwitting pagans.

It’s official: Rebecca Black is doing the Lord’s work. Expect a harp arrangement of “Friday” some time in the next millennium.

And by “the next millennium,” I mean last year sometime:

This guy seems to have precisely the level of brainpower they’re looking for:

For that matter, as long as you’re trying to download some RAM, why don’t you see if you can download one of those big terabyte drives? Shouldn’t take you more than, oh, when did Starfleet get those replicators anyway?

“Yes, I’ll take it, and no, I don’t want to do any of that tiresome ‘due diligence’ crap”:

I bought a car and the dealership misinformed me about the type of tires on the car what can i do?

when i went to purchase my car i asked the dealer multiple times whether or not the car had all season tires. it has been a month now and i realize the tires are actually summer performance tires. What can i do?

Apparently actually looking at a tire sidewall for the letters M&S (or the jaggedy winter-tire symbol) is considered bad form these days.

I don’t think I’d ever want to sell cars, especially given the number of customers who think they’re Chuck Berry.

I grumble a lot about Yahoo! Answers, but I continue to hang out there, generally confining myself to subjects I know something about, motivated by the fact that there are lots of people even dumber than I am.

Which is why this is so dispiriting:

A growing number of college presidents and faculty are concerned about student plagiarism in the Internet age. But the questions raised by this analysis go beyond ethics. Wouldn’t professors be disheartened to learn that a significant share of students are harvesting their facts not from an old-fashioned encyclopedia but from Yahoo Answers?

Y!A, apparently, is second only to Wikipedia as a source of, um, “borrowed content,” despite this:

On this site … accuracy is determined by a popular vote. Fact and opinion dwell side by side.

Disclosure: I got a Best Answer this week for something I answered a year ago; the answer turned out to be wrong after all — the company changed its plans — but it’s too late to do anything about it now.

(Via Fark.)

Unless you have detailed maintenance records on a car, and chances are you don’t, it’s a pain to get caught up:

The car has 60,000 miles on it and I don’t think it has ever had any maintenance done besides oil and filter changes. Is there anything else that should be done? Well, it could use a new air filter and the coolant (anti-freeze) should be changed, but other than that, no, not really.

The timing belt does not need to be replaced till we reach 105,000 miles.

The Teeming Milieu that is Yahoo! Answers is, to the last boyjill among them, utterly terrified of timing belts: they’ll go out of their way to avoid buying cars that have them. I am really surprised that some enterprising automaker hasn’t started promoting chain-driven valve gear. Of course, when the chain goes, you’re spending about three or four timing belts’ worth to replace most of the upper half of the engine, but these folks will not be dissuaded.

The spark plugs need to changed occasionally, but how often depends on what kind of spark plugs you have. Are they regular, super (platinum tipped), or extra crispy (iridium! Shades of Toolmaker Koan)? How do you tell?

I will pass on Nissan’s advice on platinum plugs — every 105k miles — and tell you in the same breath to ignore it. Nothing routinely engaged in explosions needs to be sitting in your engine for a hundred thousand miles. (At 132k, Gwendolyn is on her third set.)

The intake valves on some engines need to be adjusted. Which engines?

Whichever ones don’t have hydraulic adjusters, though that’s not much help by itself. My old Toyota Celica needed the shims re-shimmied every 60k or so, as did the second Mazda 626 (but not the first, which had the hydraulics). Then again, Infiniti has a procedure for adjusting valve clearance, but it appears nowhere on the schedule, not even at the Severe Service level.

Then again, again:

I finish looking through the maintenance schedule and I realize I did not see anything about the automatic transmission. For all the cars I have ever dealt with before, checking the transmission fluid level was a regular deal, and changing it was something that needed doing ever few years. What’s going on? I look through the schedule again and there are all kinds of things you are supposed to check like hoses and belts and brakes and boots, but I can find nothing about the transmission. I finally find an entry, but it is in the severe service list, so it is not like I am blind.

In general, I don’t trust ATF after about 30,000 miles, even the sort-of-pricey synthetic I’m using now. (It has about 8k on it now.) Infiniti doesn’t even mention the stuff (except for “Inspect”) in the Normal Service table, which seems to be what all the cool kids are doing now. However, Severe calls for 30k intervals. And fortunately, the dipstick is not hard to find, though it’s long and unwieldy. (Same for the oil dipstick, for that matter.)

Aggrieved dork goes into paroxysm:

Is it illegal for a car dealership to sell you a used car with a flat spare tire?

i have a 2000 dodge intrepid and the tire blew and went to put on the spare tire and it was flat lucky for me i was close to home but was wondering is this legal?

Later:

it was bought a few months ago and this was the first time need the spare since all the tires were fine

So he’d had the car for “a few months,” and it never occurred to him to look in the trunk?

I really hope he sues. Few things in life are quite so enjoyable as someone being laughed out of a courtroom.

Well, “day” probably isn’t the correct term:

How many hours will it take to download 36.6gb at 45-50kb/s? It’s a sitcom series.

At this point, we’re talking fortnights, not hours, assuming nothing goes wrong — and how often does nothing go wrong?

Similarly:

How to know if my windows xp is retail or OEM ?

Weren’t you there when you bought it?

Oh. Silly me.

The automobile dealership is reviled by all and sundry, largely because the process of acquiring an automobile is, by any reasonable standards, far more complicated and nerve-wracking than it needs to be.

However, if we stipulate the above, in good conscience we must also concede that rather a lot of the customers are just barely able to pick up Slim Jims at the C-store, let alone negotiate a vehicle purchase. A few recent examples from Yahoo! Answers, which is just loaded with such folks:

• Can I return a new car after four moths?
  No, but see if the warranty covers upholstery damage.
• Software engineer in USA can drive Mercedes Benj. Why not in India? ?
  Software engineer in USA is probably making more than $8 an hour.
• How much should you make to afford a nissan gtr?
  You won’t see software engineers driving them.
• If Lexus cars are so expensive to maintain how do people that look like they live in the ghetto drive them?
  They do software engineering part-time.
• What does the hot coolant light mean?
  Pull over at once, get out of the car, and take the bus for the rest of your life. Sheesh.
• Is 7MPG bad for my 1997 range rover?
  If you can afford a Range Rover, what the hell do you care about gas mileage?
• I am thinking of adding 22′s on my 1995 toyota camry coupe!?
  Here’s a money-saving idea: instead of the 22s, print up a sign that says I HAVE ABSOLUTELY NO FRICKIN’ TASTE and stick it in the back glass. Same effect, better handling.

I have no plans to make this a regular feature, but it’s not like I’m ever going to run out of these either.

On the upside, if he ignores it for long enough, he can go back to riding the bus, where questions of this sort don’t come up quite so often.

After all, there’s no other reason to ask this:

What font does Alabama use on the driver license where it ask you how tall you are, sex, eyes and hair?

They do seem to start young these days.

Normally I just put up a link to unusually-stupid Yahoo! Answers questions, but I suspect this one will be deleted real fast, so you get a screenshot too:

The first thing I thought of was actually printable, but it didn’t stand a chance in hell against the Y! terms of service.