McG’s lived in some places one might fairly describe as Pretty Damned Cold:

Now, in Fairbanks we frequently saw 30 below, 40 below, one morning during our time up there it got down to 58 below. At certain low temperatures the difference between any one degree value and another becomes a matter of thermometric curiosity more than anything else. The Settled Science™ boffins assure us cold snaps like these are just a passing fad and by the time Wyoming becomes a coastal state the entire planet will be uninhabitable anyway. In fact I seem to recall being assured at one point that snowfalls are already a thing of the past.

We used to have a client in Fairbanks, a small nonprofit which would suspend its bimonthly meetings if the temperature was below -45°F.

And you’ll notice that none of the dullards predicting beach houses in Laramie have moved so much as twenty miles farther inland.

I suppose the biggest difference between a Wyoming winter and a Fairbanks winter is latitude; Fairbanks, just a couple of degrees south of the Arctic Circle, has sunrise and sunset all year round, but in December those events can practically both be observed during the same coffee break.

Kind of makes you wonder why there’s such a thing as Alaska Daylight Time.

It’s perhaps not ready for the States yet, but the Scandinavian trial was decently successful:

Vegans were cautiously excited when a McDonald’s vegan burger was introduced in Sweden and Finland late last year. Mainly, people wanted to know: would it be McGood?

And after almost six months on the menu, all signs point to YES.

Described by writer Sidsel Overgaard as “firm, weighty, a tiny bit smoky with a strange — but not unpleasant — note of instant ramen, the patty comes topped with a generous dose of McFeast sauce (a vegan ‘special sauce’), lettuce, tomato, onion and pickles,” the McVegan burger sounds pretty similar to McDonald’s standard burger fare.

Other customers were pleased with the plant-based McDonald’s vegan burger, calling it “good” and “very tolerable,” which, although not super complimentary, is better than the alternative. One meat lover even said of the soy-based patty, “It was like meat. It was a good experience — I really like it,” adding that he’ll probably order it again.

No date has been set for an American introduction, but I’m pretty sure McVegan will show up here soon.

Everything I’ve seen says that this song came out in 2008:

Yet somehow, I get the feeling I’ve seen it all before.

Look, Mom, it’s escaping radioactivity!

For 2 weeks in the fall of 2017, traces of the isotope ruthenium-106 wafted across Europe. The radioactive cloud was too thin to be dangerous, but it posed a mystery to scientists. Now, researchers at the French Institute of Radioprotection and Nuclear Security say the isotope may have been released from the Mayak nuclear facility in southern Russia. They argue the leak may have happened when technicians botched the fabrication of a cerium-144 source needed in the search for sterile neutrinos at the Gran Sasso National Laboratory in L’Aquila, Italy. The Russian government has vehemently denied that an accident took place, however.

There exist many isotopes of ruthenium, with atomic weights from 87 to 120; only seven are stable. Ruthenium-106 does not exist in nature, but has been synthesized from other nuclei; its half-life is just over a year. (Some of the others won’t last more than a minute or two.)

(Via Fark.)

I got this from one of Jack Baruth’s commenters, and I have decided that if I ever get this whiny about a mere car, you should borrow an AR-15 from a classmate and perforate my rib cage:

Said another commenter:

There are weak, confused drama queens about, in this unfortunate time; and a lot of them are, at least chromosonally, males. Here in my little hipster settlement in the Bitterroots, we have more than the average share — California expats.

Okay. Weak and stupid people abound.

THEY DON’T HAVE THE MONEY TO BUY MERCEDES-BENZES.

How does this HAPPEN? Like you said … it’s insured. He just bought it. Stand back and watch the fireworks; and think about whether you want to use the insurance money to get another … or maybe, not make the same mistake twice.

But no. There with his woman with him … he’s carrying on like a scared four-year-old. And who comes to help him? An ARMY MAN. Someone who DOES have emotional and mental discipline.

As Roberta X says:

[N]o one wins their last battle; the best any of us can hope for is to enter it unafraid.

I don’t think I’m quite to that point yet.

“Can a Financier Finance a SubPrime Car?” asks a guy trying to sound like he knows what he’s talking about:

A financier financed a car that I thought was in working condition and had a few cosmetic issues… I got tired of fixing it under the hood, bought another car out-right, and they repossessed the financed one. Then charged me to “make it new again”-very costly… before auctioning it off for a measly 300 dollars claiming that the engine needed to be rebuilt and the the vehicle was “abused” and I know that all I ever did was take care of it. What should I do. I reported them to the CFPB for their collections tactics etc. and they still haven’t deleted the collection item. What can I do? I don’t have “before” pictures.

Um, Bunkie? This is not Walmart. You don’t get your money back. Ever. And “… that I thought was in working condition” is utterly worthless in view of “I got tired of fixing it under the hood.”

The real question, though, is why, if you were in a position to buy a car “out-right,” did you take out a loan for that first piece of crap — and then default on that loan? You played this about as badly as it’s possible to play it.

Have we seen this before? The Thunder pounded the Kings for 44 points in the first quarter, and then promptly folded: in the middle quarters, Sacramento flattened OKC to the tune of 69-41, including a 16-0 run to close the third. (Yes, we have seen this before, on the seventh of November.) So the final frame began with the Kings up 90-85. The Thunder managed to creep to a one-point lead inside the three-minute mark, and at :55, it was a two-point lead. The Kings were not done yet, and with one second left, the score was tied at 107. Finally, Russell Westbrook, who hadn’t made a trey all night, dropped one through to the accompaniment of the horn. OKC 110, Sacramento 107, and:

Billy Donovan did not even crack a smile after that shot

— Kurt (@K_Freudenberger) February 23, 2018

He’s thinking forward to Golden State Saturday night.

The live box score has been down since the end of the third quarter. Radio guy Matt Pinto said, more than once, that he was sure that Westbrook trey was doomed. Figure 23 for Carmelo, 26 for Paul George, and a Westbrook minimal triple-double. The old guys from the Kings managed to show up the rookies; Zack Randolph (age 36) had a game-high 29, and Vince Carter (age 41) came up with 14. Still, the Sacramento bench more than held its own against the Thunder reserves.

From my 2008 review of Volume One by She & Him:

[Zooey] Deschanel wrote most of these songs, and they fit into a mostly-forgotten segment of the pop spectrum: wedged between Shelby Flint and Norma Tanega. (“Black Hole,” to me, sounds like a long-lost sequel to “Walkin’ My Cat Named Dog.”)

A decade later, this comes down the tweetstream:

I bet even @dustbury hasn't heard of this song: "Walkin' My Cat Named Dog", by one Norma Tanega. 1966. https://t.co/LKQM7X7yJQ via @youtube #music

— John Salmon (@JohnSalmon859) February 21, 2018

I didn’t miss too many songs from 1966 that made it all the way up to #22 in Billboard.

Tanega was from Vallejo, California. She began as a painter, got her MFA degree, and would eventually cut four singles and an LP for Bob Crewe’s New Voice label, also the home of Mitch Ryder and the Detroit Wheels. Only the second single, “A Street That Rhymes at Six A.M.” (if you like off-center titles), made any chart noise:

Shortly afterwards, she traveled to England, where she met Dusty Springfield; after lots of back-and-forth communications, she and Dusty wound up as a couple, and Dusty recorded some of Norma’s songs. An example:

They broke up in 1971, Tanega recorded an LP for RCA’s British outpost, and while this was the last release under her name, she appears on several more albums in a group context. Meanwhile, she still paints.

The story begins here:

In July of 2017, 13-year-old Olivia Goodreau was on vacation in Missouri with her family. While outside Olivia noticed a tick on her dog, Mo (short for Missouri). Olivia & her mom watched the tick start to burrow into Mo’s leg. They quickly found needle nose tweezers to properly remove the tick from Mo. As Olivia was removing the tick she asked her mom, “”s there an app that can show what ticks are around us?” That night Olivia looked online and found that currently there was no app to help track, report, and educate people about ticks. This gave Olivia the idea to create the TickTracker app to help keep everyone safe.

I understood. Forty-five (!) years before that, I was stationed at Fort Leonard Wood in Missouri, where, according to the popular jape of the times, the state flower is the rock and the state bird is the tick. God knows I saw plenty of both over the two seasons I spent there.

The LivLyme Foundation was set up to develop the app and aggregate user data. TickTracker is offered at no charge. And if you ask me, they ought to be selling some of these spiffy black caps worn by the development team.

(Dear Brad Paisley: would you be interested in lending your name to a Good Cause?)

“God damn it,” thought the sociopath, “why is no one paying attention to me?”

Yes, yes, lots of kids don’t get the attention they need. Guess what? Neither do a lot of adults. And yes, some of them act out in bad ways. But a lot of us have learned the control and also are reactive enough to peer-disapproval to not act out in bad ways. (Confession: I crave attention a lot and don’t get it often, but I mostly restrict that by doing a lot of tweeting and then hoping someone responds to me. I’m too inhibited to do truly outre things like dying my hair wild colors, or saying really provocative things, or other kinds of minor social transgressions that might get attention, but that might bring negative attention.) So I feel irritated when I’m sitting here, sometimes feeling invisible, and someone else, who is apparently feeling invisible, decides to screw up an entire school day and possibly scare fellow students and even teachers … it seems v. selfish to me, and I admit — as I said on Twitter — the somewhat-unChristian part of me says “I hope that kid gets plenty of attention going through the juvenile court system” but yeah — actions have consequences.

Attention whores gotta whore.

Which leads us here:

As Professor Jennifer Johnston and Andrew Joy of Western New Mexico University found in a paper presented to the American Psychological Association’s annual convention in 2016, “media contagion” can help make mass shootings more common. “Unfortunately,” said Johnston, “we find that a cross-cutting trait among many profiles of mass shooters is desire for fame.” The rise of such a trait in mass shooters, she claimed, rose “in correspondence to the emergence of widespread 24-hours news coverage on cable news programs, and the rise of the internet during the same period.” Johnston recommended a media pact to “no longer share, reproduce, or retweet the names, faces, detailed histories or long-winded statements of killers, we could see a dramatic reduction in mass shootings in one to two years.”

Never happen with US media, which are already irrevocably committed to promoting a specific agenda; should their political bosses decide that it suits their purposes to spread the perp’s name far and wide, you’ll see wire stories, rewrites of wire stories, and tweets of wire stories, all doing exactly that, in a matter of minutes. (Remember: “it’s okay when we do it.”)

Hyundai’s new Tiny Crossover is called “Kona,” except where it isn’t:

The car will be sold in Portugal as the Hyundai Kauai, as Kona is too similar to “cona”, the slang word for the female genitalia in Portuguese. Like Kona, Kauai is a western island of Hawaii.

And there’s one more outlier:

In the People’s Republic of China, the car will be released as the Hyundai Encino.

Because what sophisticated Chinese buyers want is a Korean car named after a section of L.A.’s San Fernando Valley, right?

You know the real problem with Fergie’s jazzed-up version of the National Anthem at the NBA All-Star Game? It wasn’t jazzed-up enough. Here’s how it should have gone:

And hey, she’s still a better singer than will.i.am.

But yeah, I’d be surprised too:

Patrick Reames had no idea why Amazon.com sent him a 1099 form saying he’d made almost $24,000 selling books via Createspace, the company’s on-demand publishing arm. That is, until he searched the site for his name and discovered someone has been using it to peddle a $555 book that’s full of nothing but gibberish.

I’ve bought rather a lot of gibberish from Amazon, though I’m quite sure I paid less than $555 for it. This is a different sort of scheme entirely:

“Based on what I could see from the ‘sneak peak’ function, the book was nothing more than a computer generated ‘story’ with no structure, chapters or paragraphs — only lines of text with a carriage return after each sentence,” Reames said in an interview with KrebsOnSecurity.

The impersonator priced the book at $555 and it was posted to multiple Amazon sites in different countries. The book — which as been removed from most Amazon country pages as of a few days ago — is titled Lower Days Ahead, and was published on Oct 7, 2017.

Reames said he suspects someone has been buying the book using stolen credit and/or debit cards, and pocketing the 60 percent that Amazon gives to authors. At $555 a pop, it would only take approximately 70 sales over three months to rack up the earnings that Amazon said he made.

Nor is this the only example of the scheme:

[S]earching Amazon for the name Vyacheslav Grzhibovskiy turns up dozens of Kindle “books” that appear to be similar gibberish works — most of which have the words “quadrillion,” “trillion” or a similar word in their titles. Some retail for just one or two dollars, while others are inexplicably priced between $220 and $320.

(Via Fark.)

Toyota, having contemplated the design of future electric cars, has perforce been required to take a fresh look at magnets (how do they work?):

Electric motors found in EVs use magnetism to create rotational energy, which is then transferred to the axle shafts and drive wheels. Without straying too far into the technological weeds, the motor utilizes magnets, along with alternating current, to create a rotating magnetic field with which to spin the rotor, thus creating a means of propulsion. And batteries aren’t the cheapest things in the world.

Toyota’s plan is to eliminate the use of terbium and dysprosium in these magnets, and halve the use of neodymium. (Hands up if you’ve ever heard of these metals.) The automaker expects neodymium demand to outstrip supply by 2025, making it a good time to start leaving it in the rear-view. Instead of these rare earth metals, Toyota will use lanthanum and cerium. Both of these metals are 20 percent cheaper and less likely to skyrocket in price as EV sales rise.

Former chemistry student here. Of course I’ve heard of them. And I have a fair-sized chunk of neodymium in my own highly non-electric car: it’s part of the magnet that moves the voice coil of the subwoofer hanging off the rear deck.

And here’s rather a lot of the stuff, in spherical form:

(No thanks to the Consumer Product Safety Commission, which really hates these things, though apparently more for the swallowing risk than for the magetism. Title swiped from Freezepop.)

If Severian had a choice in the matter — but never mind, let him tell it:

As Libertarianism attracts mainly college kids, who don’t know what they don’t know, I present the following as a public service:

This “non-aggression principle” you keep going on about … that’s been covered. As always, a Dead White Male got there first.

Thomas Hobbes said the first Law of Nature — the very first one, and please note the capitals — is: “seek peace.” Problem is, no individual man is powerful enough to guarantee peace for himself against all the other people he’s forced to interact with. So we form covenants — what comes to be known as the famous “social contract” — in order to secure peace for ourselves and our posterity. Hobbes spends the rest of a fairly long book exploring the consequences of this social contract.

That book is Leviathan, and it ends with the most absolute monarch that ever could be. Hobbes’s reasoning is irrefutable if you grant his premises. It’s worth reading. Our forefathers thought so, at least, since all that “by the people, for the people” stuff — Locke, Montesquieu, the whole schmear — is an attempt to wrestle with Hobbes’s premises without arriving at his conclusion. They used to teach this stuff in Humanities 101, I swear.

Yeah, but that was before navel-gazing became the Prime Directive. Hobbes saw that coming too:

“For such is the nature of man, that howsoever they may acknowledge many others to be more witty, or more eloquent, or more learned; Yet they will hardly believe there be many so wise as themselves: For they see their own wit at hand, and other men’s at a distance.”

The contemporary social-media equivalent is the liking, even the retweeting, of one’s own posts.

And if not, how do you explain this dumbass?

I watch porn every now and then. It’s not very often but sometimes I just have the urge. Anyway, about a week ago, I was searching and I came across this channel of a couple. I’ve came across videos of couples before but this couple was really funny. Apparently throughout most of their videos, they constantly make jokes. I liked it so much because it is exactly how and friend and I are in bed together. I don’t know much about them. It was a male and female, both white, they were both really funny, and most of their videos were shot with a headset camera. I don’t remember anything about their channel name. If anyone has any idea who this is, let me know.

Fortunately, there is very little porn on the Internet, so this should be really easy to find.

Seven-year-olds can learn how to set browser bookmarks. Why can’t he?