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If the economy’s shit, then Rhode Island must be one of the last stops in the plumbing. My inquisitive substitute hygienist mentioned her visit there, and I couldn’t help but interrupt her scraping with my dismal outlook for the Ocean State. (Well, it worked. For me.) Seems I might’ve used this once-proud freeway ziggurat as evidence, too. Was a time when their aisles were full of desirable merchandise, and in the back was a Newport Creamery where I was introduced to the delicacies of vinegar on hot french fries and chocolate jimmies on vanilla ice cream, respectively. None of which, by the way, is available at Wal-Mart.

This one deserves to be included in that last potpourri of a post with the emoticon, because I’ve been listening to the station regularly for quite some time now without being turned off. While I wish there were a way to analyze the RDS information and filter out the Allman Brothers, Counting Crows and Matchbox 20, their eclectic playlist reminds me of hearing Heaven 17’s “Let Me Go” on KLOL. KLOL. What struck me as particularly effective are their album-side Wednesdays (or Thursdays, I forget); this generation who have their iPods set to shuffle, if they even remember the discs the MP3’s were ripped from, will never know the artistry of track arrangement, the bliss of discovering surprisingly good filler material before the hiss making up the remainder of the tape. Or being blown away as the needle abruptly came up at the end of Red Sails in the Sunset.

I can’t get over how much beady-eyed Max with his close-cropped hair and knack for infuriating bumbling reminds me of W. Then there’s the nonchalant racism, which must’ve escaped me as a lad but prompted a double-take last night: the Chief explains that Miss Formosa, she of the unforgettable “true KAOS” line, avoided detection by CONTROL’s computer because “people from that part of the world” looked too much alike for it. Interestingly enough, they missed the cue for the laugh track (or left it out, on second thought).

Haven’t actually seen too much of the show (I preferred Harvey Birdman’s revisit of Jonny Quest: insane, irreverent and only 12 minutes long), but I do dig their box design:

Pardon the recent image-heaviness. Like the lower gas prices reducing our mileage reimbursements, we also probably ought to adjust the classic thousand-word ratio to something like a hundred (many of them, like “definitely” and “losing”, misspelled).

Gear like this tempt me towards the iPhone, not that I’d ever actually exert the effort in such a project (besides, I learned my lesson returning a barely-audible Bluetooth handset), but because of its sheer ubiquity as a development platform. Like there’ll ever be a rotary dialing app for the Storm. Or “rubbing” pr0n.

What’s sad about this controversy is not that I’m actually siding with the object of rice-eater desire, but because its source hails from a country already notorious for fixing their faces, whose otherwise 우리나라만세 people are long deaf to the message of that forty-plus year-old episode of the Twilight Zone with the girl in the future questioning all her societal pressure to become the same as everyone else.

Who were those Blue Book guys, who cares—I’ll take this memory of the kid backing down the ramp (although over the years the creature had grown lankier and more alien in my mind, to the point of being computer-generated before the technology was even available) and the pre-Conan O’Brien mouthpiece (again, I had since added a mix of clips to match the different voices) to my grave. Wasn’t there also a creepy episode that ended with a poem about a flame in a rose? Yes.

Why instant-runoff voting can never be combined with write-in candidates—for the sake of human civilization, man!

Dunno how long NBC’ll keep it up, but not too shabby a first whole episode. Never mind the 2-fer political progressives in the cast; for me, of course, it was the reunion of three from Night Court’s. Markie Post is 58 and looks great. Didn’t John Larroquette’s Dan Fielding once say to her as (a then pregnant) Christine Sullivan, “Do those get any bigger?!” And here I still can’t recite a single line from a Supreme Court case.

I like this thing. Reminds me of robot designs I imagined while first listening to the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Like this would be an interface-plate for Edie, the transvestite version of Eddie, the Heart of Gold’s shipboard computer, that might have appeared as a result of a mishap with the Infinite Improbability Drive. I’m not sure what “quintessential robot voice” means, but it should sound like Graham Chapman doing falsetto through a tube.