Yahoo! Answers is good for at least half a dozen of these a week:

The gory details:

I have a 2014 mustang and the payments are 400 a month. I owe around 19000 on it. I need help finding a way to get rid of it as soon as possible. Thanks

If he’s lucky, he might get $14,000 for it, in which case he needs to scrape up $5000, sell the ‘Stang, and turn over the proceeds to the lender. Problem solved. It’s not the solution he wants, but it’s the solution that actually works.

Of course, there’s always Chapter 7, which has, shall we say, certain disadvantages.

But what bothers me is the blithe assumption that there’s some way to “get out of the loan early” without serious consequences. Life doesn’t work quite that way. (At least, it never has for me, and I admit to occasional bouts of presumptuousness.) Unfortunately, a substantial sector of automotive retailing is reliant upon luring people with no money into the showrooms.

“Travis County Commissioner Gerald Daugherty,” says the YouTube video description, “is a proven fighter for better roads, lower taxes, and responsible county spending.” But there are other reasons to vote for him:

“Quite possibly the best ad of this political season,” says Pejman Yousefzadeh.

Welcome to Monday. Please fasten your seat belt, and prepare yourself from a highly unscientific sampling of actual search strings by which Web surfers actually managed to encounter this very site. (No wagering.)

J has an accidental death and dismemberment policy with a principal sum of $50,000. While trimming:  I think we’re going to trim this story right here before it gets gory.

home depot jury duty policy:  If someone is killed by a power tool, you’re excused.

don’t you give me no dirty looks:  Has the dog been brought in and the cat put out?

yuja wang upskirt:  Not on your life. For one thing, there’s no room to hide a camera among the pedals.

jaded amaranthus range:  Matching fridge and washer/dryer combo sold separately.

i want to go to jail yahoo answers:  You keep coming up with questions like this and you will.

in a televised “social experiment” by the local television network, 12 people — 6 white and 6 african american — were asked to live together for one week. they varied in their level of prejudice; however, those with low levels of prejudice became less prejudiced, while those with high levels became more:  Annoying, to the surprise of no one.

jenny lawson net worth:  Shut up and give her money. She’s The Bloggess, after all.

a woman, alone in a house, ignores the creaking sounds she hears and experiences no stress. another woman hears the same sounds, suspects an intruder, and becomes alarmed. these different reactions illustrate which of the following?  Almost every TV advertisement for home security systems.

hostile groove fly routine:  We don’t need this hostile groove fly.

take me to steak n shake:  Well, that settles the question of where we’re going to eat.

a beelzebub; he spake as bigly and fiercely as a soaken yeoman at an election feast, this obedient and conducible youth!  Sounds to me like it’s rigged.

phlagm:  Phlegm’s younger brother, seldom seen.

monty python thermostat:  And the Lord spake, saying, “First shalt thou set the temperature to 73. No more. No less. Seventy-three shalt be the number thou shalt set, and the number of the setting shall be 73. Seventy-four shalt thou not set, neither set thou 72, excepting that thou then proceed to 73. Seventy-five is right out.”

“Lisa,” Homer said in his sternest voice, “in this house we obey the laws of thermodynamics.”

But maybe Lisa was a little bit ahead of the game:

For more than a century and a half of physics, the Second Law of Thermodynamics, which states that entropy always increases, has been as close to inviolable as any law we know. In this universe, chaos reigns supreme.

But researchers with the U.S. Department of Energy’s Argonne National Laboratory announced recently that they may have discovered a little loophole in this famous maxim.

Their research, published in Scientific Reports, lays out a possible avenue to a situation where the Second Law is violated on the microscopic level.

Still, the violation was actually anticipated, yes, a century and a half ago:

As far back as 1867, physicist James Clerk Maxwell described a hypothetical way to violate the Second Law: if a small theoretical being sat at the door between the hot and cold rooms and only let through particles traveling at a certain speed. This theoretical imp is called “Maxwell’s demon.”

And you can’t get much more impish than quantum effects, am I right?

Citation: Lesovik, G. B. et al. H-theorem in quantum physics. Sci. Rep. 6, 32815; doi: 10.1038/srep32815 (2016).

My little tiny music player has 5,088 songs on it, and probably half of them have album-cover art attached; I don’t feel compelled to fetch the rest of them, since the player only holds 36 GB (up from 4 when it was new) and the picture you can barely make out on the teensy screen takes up a surprisingly large amount of storage space.

Then again, one of those tracks has this for cover art:

Warner Bros. actually released that album in 1989, including this track:

Okay, it isn’t Bad Brains, but it will mess with your head just the same.

Remember when I was a detail-oriented worker, perhaps not the fastest, but guaranteed to get to the end of the project with as few problems as possible?

Gawd, I miss those days.

Two Sundays ago, there was an email from the Oklahoman apologizing for late delivery: “You may be aware that as of Monday our production and manufacturing of the newspaper is now being completed in Tulsa.”

Inevitably, this additional hour or so of processing time — I assume the content is delivered to Tulsa electronically, but the actual papers have to come back down the Turner Turnpike — leads to this sort of thing:

So this might have been predictable:

Death of @TheOklahoman Sports Page? Warning print subscribers today, that final score of OU football's 7pm game won't be in paper tomorrow? pic.twitter.com/7MkeOUjWyr

— Jim Cowan (@CowanBrew) October 22, 2016

And likewise this, the following morning:

@CowanBrew I'm sorry the OU game was not in today's paper. Any unpublished content is available online at https://t.co/dbHnVPiiLb -VB

— TheOklahoman (@TheOklahoman) October 23, 2016

But hey, they saved some money, so it’s all good.

Oh, OU beat Texas Tech, 66-59, which sounds for all the world like a basketball score.

I mean, who would have ever thought so?

Gender scholar asks 55 women if there's a link between being a woman and having a vagina https://t.co/ET3uQJDozJ pic.twitter.com/gtmmWgZtVE

— New Real Peer Review (@RealPeerReview) September 15, 2016

Elsevier will sell you this paper for $35.95, or about a buck and a quarter per howler.

(Via Michelle Catlin.)

We don’t have royalty in this country, the best efforts of some people who think themselves throneworthy notwithstanding, but we do have a great deal of internecine warfare, which may be the one thing we have in common with kingdoms of the past:

[P]eers maneuvering to ruin each other was the national sport of every court in the Middle Ages, in their brief breaks between trying to kill each other on the battlefield. Very few kings got shanked, even when it was in everyone’s obvious best interest (e.g. the Hundred Years’ War, which would’ve been about 75 years shorter if someone had just slipped Jean II some tainted snails).

This is a lesson our wannabe-aristocrats in the political elite should ponder. As the Z Man points out re: Hillary Clinton, she’s not in it for the ego-stroke; she’s in it for the money. But the Clintons are arrivistes, the 21st century equivalent of hustling rubes from the sticks who bought their patents of nobility from an addled old monarch who found them almost as useful as they were amusing. While being a titled court jester suits Bill just fine — he’s a poonhound who only cares about droit de seigneur — Hillary’s got a hole in her soul that no amount of money will ever fill. She certainly thinks she’s in it for the money, as she has understandably confused money with security and above all prestige … but she’s wrong, as she will find out to her great dismay should she win the Presidency. Even if the King is a drooling halfwit, he’s still the King, and she’s not, and never will be. We can only hope she doesn’t set the world ablaze trying to avoid that lesson.

Then again, our purposes are not well served by electing a drooling halfwit and expecting him to behave in kingly fashion.

For your consideration: Saffron Burrows, 44 today, briefly a model, then a working actress, currently in Amazon’s series Mozart in the Jungle, season three of which begins airing in December.

“Incandescently lovely,” said Craig Ferguson, and of course he was correct:

Her most recent feature film, Quitters, was released this past summer after debuting at SXSW in 2015.

Burrows, an American citizen since 2009, is married to Alison Balian, a writer for Ellen DeGeneres’ daily talk show; they have one son.

It is de rigueur in some circles to complain about early voting, usually with dark, mumbled references to “vote fraud.” I suppose it could be a fraud vector — just one among many — but it’s still a defensible practice:

In principle, early voting is described as a bad thing because it encourages people to vote before having the chance to learn all there is to know about a candidate or ballot question. In practice, it dissipates the impact of “October Surprise” gotcha revelations about a candidate or ballot question — which in my mind isn’t a bad thing. Eliminating the incentive to play endgame gotcha tricks on the electorate changes the tenor and rhythm of campaigns, and really the only ones with reason to complain are those who rely on such tricks.

And in this particular year, where both major campaigns are decidedly, even desperately, gotcha-oriented, there’s a lot to be said for being able to tune that stuff out.

Adobe Photoshop/Premiere Elements v.13 arrived here yesterday, and there’s an FDA-ish Black Box Warning on the package:

ONLY FOR DISTRIBUTION IN NORTH AMERICA

Not for distribution anywhere else, including the EEA, Switzerland, Eastern Europe, Africa, the Middle East, the Caribbean, South America, Central America, Japan, or Asia Pacific.

Or, presumably, Mars, once Elon Musk organizes an expedition.

I don’t really blame this guy for taking the Anonymous option:

Can an insurance company sell a salvaged car if someone died in it, and if so, do they have to tell you?

Now houses, that’s a whole ‘nother matter:

In California, sellers must reveal if a death in the home has occurred anytime in the past three years, including death by natural causes (although certain types of deaths, like those from AIDS, cannot be disclosed). And if a buyer comes out and asks about a death that occurred at any time, even longer than three years ago, the seller is required to provide a truthful response.

I submit that there are going to be times when “How the hell do I know?” is the most truthful response available.

In Alaska and South Dakota, only murders or suicides must be disclosed if they happened within the past year. In other states the laws are less black and white; a seller may need to disclose the information only if a buyer asks.

Still, we’re talking houses. Cars? Nobody gives a damn, except this poor, superstitious soul. I can say only that it’s entirely possible for a car to be totaled, rebuilt and resold without anyone having died in it.

Now if it smells like someone died in it within the last couple of days, maybe there’s a reason to inquire.

With a Brooklyn appearance scheduled for tonight, Rebecca Black hit up just about every possible source of publicity in New York this week: WhoSay, Teen Vogue, Complex Music, MORE, and, yes, Billboard, and that’s just through Thursday. This is called maximizing one’s opportunities.

Said I two weeks ago:

Awesomeness TV was responsible for the Web series Royal Crush; RB was a cast member in season three. I suspect she’s done more work for them in the interim, and await the unveiling of same.

Consider this unveiled:

It can’t be any sillier than Ouija: Origin of Evil, opening this weekend.

InStyle.com considers this shoe “trendy”:

And I have to admit to a certain admiration for this paragraph:

CFDA/Vogue Fashion Fund–winning footwear designer Paul Andrew says Scandinavian architecture influenced his PS17 collection, and these beechwood suede slingbacks are a case in point. The graphic straps remind us of the interior of Helsinki’s underground Temppeliaukio Church.

Which is, I concede, a pretty spiffy place of worship. This shoe from Paul Andrew, at $895, may or may not be cheaper than a flight to Finland.

In addition to the stuff I expected in the absentee-ballot package, I found a yellow sheet: bonds. School bonds. Oklahoma City Public Schools wants to borrow some serious cash:

• $106,340,000: “acquiring or improving school sites, constructing, repairing, remodeling and equipping school buildings, and acquiring school furniture, fixtures and equipment.”
• $54,460,000: “acquiring or improving school sites, constructing, repairing, remodeling and equipping school buildings, and acquiring school furniture, fixtures and equipment.” My guess is that this one is the fallback position: “if we can’t have a hundred million, can we at least have fifty?”
• $19,200,000: “acquiring transportation equipment.”

For what it’s worth, OKCPS is growing rather speedily of late: long the second-largest district in the state, they passed first-place Tulsa several years ago. And the district has been frank about its problems:

“In addition to our current $30-million dollar budget shortfall, we have dire basic needs throughout the district,” said OKCPS Superintendent Aurora Lora. “Our air conditioning deficiencies in schools have been well documented the past few weeks; an aging bus fleet continues to be a major financial burden, and most of our students don’t have modern classroom technology.”

In typical Oklahoma practice, these bonds will fill in a space vacated by bonds from many years ago, now retired; this enables the claim that no actual tax increase is involved. Last year, OKCPS received about 52 percent of the tax on the palatial estate at Surlywood.