"What does not kill me," said Nietzsche, "makes me stronger."

If you've been enjoying the Barack Obama blooper reels, you might want to keep this in mind:

Then again, Hillary Clinton may yet boil Obama's bunny.

Me, I rather enjoyed the Gazette's take on The Lost Ogle, partly because author Rod Lott apparently talked to actual Ogles at some point, but mostly for Tony's final point:

Seldom are truer words spoken in blogdom.

Still, the piece gave short shrift — scarcely any shrift at all, in fact — to where Tony, Clark Matthews (how come he rates a surname?) and Patrick might be going with this little enterprise of theirs. With that in mind, I'd like to offer a few suggestions:

• Find a picture of Jenni Carlson in a bikini.
  
• And then don't post it.
  
• Drive Jim Traber to tears.
  
• Drive Jim Traber to Saskatchewan.
  
• Put together a petition to nominate Gary England for a Nobel Peace Prize.
  

This should secure their future for the next ten years or ten million page views, whichever comes first.

With gas pushing four bucks a gallon and maintenance prices out of sight, you, too, may have to abandon your motor vehicle, as did the owner of an early-Nineties Buick at 42nd and Treadmill Tuesday night. If this should happen to you, the following advice may be helpful:

• Do not draw attention to your plight: pull straight into the space, within the lines if at all possible. Taking up one space is considered merely disrespectful: taking up two spaces is heinous.

• Make arrangements to have the vehicle picked up no later than the following morning, before the actual property owners notice.

• If your vehicle is front-wheel-drive, park with the nose out: this will simplify towing, if necessary.
  

The preceding has been brought to you as a public service.

Never fear. The Irritated Tulsan has the solution:

An example:

Yeah, but what would you interrupt with?

Watch out, YouTube!

I've decided to give the Carnival of the Vanities its own section on the sidebar, rather than a single entry each week which (1) draws heinous amounts of spammers for some reason and (2) requires me to come up with some cutesy verbiage which exploits the individual Carnival number, which (3) Andrew Ian Dodge isn't using anyway.

In view of this change, and the fact that not everything I do around here is exactly intuitive, consider this an open thread to post your questions about site mechanics, motivations and policies. (Besides, there's a Woot-Off today, so I'm probably not going to write a whole lot of new stuff.)

The only Volvo on my Will Consider Next Time list is the smallish C30, and I may have to rethink that in the light of this bit of news:

I assume Mr Herzog's pedal dimensions are expressed in British terms, since the Eurostandard for ginormous clodhoppers calls for numbers in the upper 40s and beyond. That said, a British size 12 is about the same as an American size 12½, which is far from huge. (Says the guy who wears a 14.)

One question remains unanswered: didn't he test drive his Swedish steed?

(Via Autoblog.)

It's a good question: "If you knew that in five years one million people would read what you have written, what would you do with that opportunity?"

Traffic has slowed here lately, but in the last five years I have had, yes, upward of one million page views, so I am tempted to say something like "Look upon my works, ye Readers, and despair!"

But that's too easy, and it's not fair to Lynn, who put some serious thought into the things she'd like to say to her visitors.

So instead I'm going to harp on her second piece of advice, which goes like this:

Not to mention that it's a lot easier to get through life if you don't have to have things constantly explained to you. And if you're anything like me, with a tendency to invoke cultural references a bit less ephemeral than the last installment of The Daily Show, it's a lot easier to get through life if you don't have to explain things constantly. (For an illustration of what I mean, see the first three comments to this bit of shoeblogging.) This is not, incidentally, intended as a knock on The Daily Show, which has a pretty high signal-to-noise ratio for a contemporary television series, but if Jon Stewart is over your head, I submit that you're keeping your head too low.

And here's another link to Lynn. Actually, it's the same link, but if I can get you to click twice, her page views go up twice as fast. It's the least I can do, considering that building traffic these days is like pushing a boulder uphill.

Australian writer Bob Ellis, apparently wounded by a Tim Blair taunt, actually comes back with this:

Regular readers of these pages will recognize this particular gambit as Playing the Rob Schneider Card. Background, early 2005:

• Patrick Goldstein, in the Los Angeles Times, took a shot at Deuce Bigalow: European Gigolo, to the effect that it was "sadly overlooked at Oscar time because apparently nobody had the foresight to invent a category for Best Running Penis Joke Delivered by a Third-Rate Comic."

• Deuce Bigalow star Rob Schneider subsequently took out a full-page ad in Variety attacking Goldstein's credentials: "Well Mr. Goldstein, as far as your snide comments about me and my film not being nominated for an Academy Award, I decided to do some research to find what awards you have won. I went online and found that you have won nothing. Absolutely nothing. No journalistic awards of any kind, Disappointed, I went to the Pulitzer Prize database of past winners and nominees. I though, surely, there must be an omission. I typed in the name Patrick Goldstein and again, zippo — nada." And so forth.
  

Which would have been the end of that, except that six months later, Roger Ebert stepped into the fray:

Were I Bob Ellis, I'd be listening carefully for another shoe to drop. Just in case.

Tip #3409: You're on the drive home and you can't hear the tornado sirens going off because the wind is too loud.

Seriously. On 39th west of Classen I saw a city trash bin, once full of yard waste, upended. And the operative word here is "on": the bin dropped across one lane of traffic, forcing motorists to detour around it, provided of course that they even saw it, black shapes being fairly indistinguishable when the skies have next to no light to give.

As severe thunderstorms go, this one was pretty routine — except that I was actually out in it, which made it look a whole lot worse.

Update: Damage reports are coming in, and apparently the worst of it hit just a couple miles west of me.

I took just enough physics to know that air (or whatever) doesn't leak into tires, so after a particularly rocky ride down a spectacularly godawful stretch of alleged pavement — NE 36th from Kelley to Lincoln, if you're curious — it didn't occur to me to check the tire pressures.

And when I did, they were way the hell out of spec. Nissan calls for 33/30; the fronts were 35, left rear 34, right rear 32.

Now how did this happen? My best guess, and it's not so great, is that the last time Gwendolyn got a spa day, someone thought the Dunlops had done flopped, and gave them an extra shot of air. This strikes me as slightly unlikely, since I'd carefully deleted the "rotate tires" bit from the to-do list, and they certainly didn't rotate them. (The JWL mark is your friend.)

Anyway, after correction, the same stretch of road proved much less likely to bang my head into the sunroof, so I'm assuming that my gauge, despite its age (about five cars now), is still reasonably accurate.

The Harley-Davidson guys ran this in a print ad last week in USA Today, and since I would dearly love to see this turn into a cry for a rally, I'm copying it over here. (Because I need the occasional reminder myself, doncha know.)

Words to live by. (With thanks to Peter Michael DeLorenzo.)

Swiped from Fillyjonk, this premise (the explanation apparently originated elsewhere):

Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
Anna Karenina
Crime and Punishment
Catch-22
One Hundred Years of Solitude
Wuthering Heights
The Silmarillion
Life of Pi: a novel
The Name of the Rose
Don Quixote
Moby Dick
Ulysses
Madame Bovary
The Odyssey
Pride and Prejudice
Jane Eyre
The Tale of Two Cities
The Brothers Karamazov
Guns, Germs, and Steel: the fates of human societies
War and Peace
Vanity Fair
The Time Traveler’s Wife
The Iliad
Emma
The Blind Assassin
The Kite Runner
Mrs. Dalloway
Great Expectations
American Gods
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
Atlas Shrugged
Reading Lolita in Tehran: a memoir in books
Memoirs of a Geisha
Middlesex
Quicksilver
Wicked: the life and times of the wicked witch of the West
The Canterbury Tales
The Historian: a novel
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Love in the Time of Cholera
Brave New World
The Fountainhead (note 1)
Foucault’s Pendulum
Middlemarch
Frankenstein
The Count of Monte Cristo
Dracula
A Clockwork Orange
Anansi Boys
The Once and Future King
The Grapes of Wrath
The Poisonwood Bible : a novel
1984
Angels & Demons
The Inferno (and Purgatory and Paradise) (note 2)
The Satanic Verses
Sense and Sensibility
The Picture of Dorian Gray
Mansfield Park
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest
To the Lighthouse
Tess of the D'Urbervilles
Oliver Twist
Gulliver’s Travels
Les Misérables
The Corrections
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
Dune
The Prince
The Sound and the Fury
Angela's Ashes: a memoir
The God of Small Things
A People's History of the United States: 1492-present
Cryptonomicon
Neverwhere
A Confederacy of Dunces
A Short History of Nearly Everything
Dubliners
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
Beloved
Slaughterhouse-Five
The Scarlet Letter
Eats, Shoots & Leaves
The Mists of Avalon
Oryx and Crake: a novel
Collapse: how societies choose to fail or succeed
Cloud Atlas
The Confusion
Lolita
Persuasion
Northanger Abbey
The Catcher in the Rye
On the Road
The Hunchback of Notre Dame
Freakonomics: a rogue economist explores the hidden side of everything
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: an inquiry into values
The Aeneid
Watership Down
Gravity's Rainbow
The Hobbit
In Cold Blood: a true account of a multiple murder and its consequences
White Teeth
Treasure Island
David Copperfield (note 3)
The Three Musketeers

Notes:

• How I finished Atlas Shrugged and not this is amazing.
  
• With apologies to Jim Steinman and/or Meat Loaf, one out of three ain't good.
  
• This is David Copperfield with two Ps by Charles Dickens, not David Coperfield with one P by Edmund Wells.
  

And I could swear I've read Emma, but I can't remember where I picked it up, so I left it off.

Update: First paragraph redone to clarify credits.

A fellow riding shotgun in a BMW X5 in Northumberland apparently mooned the speed camera, causing wailing and gnashing of teeth for at least one minion of Her Majesty's Nanny State:

Get a grip, Jer. The camera could have gotten shot at.

(Via Nice Deb.)

Think you can change the world with your blog? You're deluded, says Professor Bainbridge:

I do in fact have a day job: 45-50 hours a week, most weeks. And while at one time I had a box full of nice (if not exactly mint) uncanceled stamps, I learned early on that philately would get me nowhere.

(Oh, come on. You knew this was coming.)

This, at least, you can't blame on Saul Alinsky:

(Heisted from HeatherRadish.)

I hesitate to say "Now I've seen everything," but there can't be much left on the list beyond four-hundred-dollar flip-flops.

Not only are they more expensive than Crocs, but apparently they're (partly) made from crocs.

(Spied at Gawker.)

I have two cell phones (one Nokia, one Motorola), each of which has its own charging cord, which is always in the last place I look.

That in itself is almost an argument for this gizmo sold by National Geographic:

The device comes with "adapters to fit most Motorola, Samsung, Nokia, and LG phones" and sells for $40. I have some doubts as to whether it will fit my Nokia 6133, but then it has nonstandard everything.

(Via Popgadget.)

I don't do a lot of grocery shopping at Target, mostly because the Target nearest to me is a couple of rungs short of Super-hood and therefore lacks a lot of grocery-store essentials, but I did have that 10-percent-off card, so while I was picking up stuff like furnace filters at a Target of greater Superness, I poked through the food aisles and turned up a curiosity: "New York Vanilla" ice cream, under their Market Pantry house brand.

One has to assume, given the price of real vanilla, that the flavoring is largely synthetic, but it's a darn good synthetic. The yellowish color hints at the presence of eggs, which I am given to understand are an essential component of true New York Vanilla, but if they're on the ingredient panel, they're concealed behind something science-y. Target HQ being in Minnesota, maybe this is New York Mills Vanilla. It's still pretty good.

Note the clever use of the word "improve":

This, of course, could not possibly have anything to do with the fact that the EU mandate for more fuel-efficient cars means less fuel tax flowing into the Dutch treasury. (See, for instance, this Oregon proposal from five years ago.)

"Full deployment" of the system is expected by 2016.

Trini sent me a download link for the newest Nine Inch Nails project, The Slip, which was offered as a Zip file full of variable-rate MP3s or, if you do torrents, Apple Lossless, FLAC or actual .wav files. I don't do torrents, so I opted for the MP3s, which sounded decent enough.

Somewhere during the download, I found myself with a horrible thought: What if I actually met NIN's Trent Reznor and he turned out to be your genial, neighborly, 1432 Franklin Pike Circle Hero sort of guy? Surely he can't be this angst-y all the time, especially after having cleaned up 100 percent following some industrial-strength substance abuse.

Or maybe he can, and after some reflection (and listening to the tracks on The Slip), I figured out just what it was I've been responding to in NIN's music. Reznor isn't even close to monochromatic, tonally or emotionally; but his reaction to emotion, as I perceive it anyway, is binary: he confronts it, or he wallows in it. This is very like me, except that I do way more wallowing than confronting. I tossed this notion at Trini, who is more of a NIN fan than I am, and she said that it made sense to her. Then again, I suspect she's still a bit surprised that I, barely on the near side of fifty-five, pay the slightest bit of attention to Nine Inch Nails, especially given my affinity for the Dawn Eden dictum "I don't consider myself legally bound to know about any music past 1968."

Speaking of 1968, Kim du Toit has a nice overview of some choice albums of that year, not all of which have been played to death in the subsequent four decades. Trent Reznor, I note for no particular reason, was three that year.

Sk*rt, a sort of Digg for Dames, is changing its name for some reason. Of the finalists, I'm partial to "Lemonade," if only because they've suggested that they'd go to the trouble of snarfing up a German domain for it: it would perforce be lemona.de. I think "Kirtsy" will win, though.

CQ Politics has come up with something called VP Madness, in which you get to select John McCain's running mate, kinda sorta. (A similar scheme for the Democrats will be rolled out "once the nominee is set.")

It will be interesting to see how the results compare with the suggestions in Baseball Crank's GOP Veepstakes.

(Swiped from the California Yankee.)

That's about the only way I can explain how