A recent trip through the DUMBO annex of ABC Carpet convinced us that while we are the type of family that covets a $4000-marked-down-to-$2700 Italian hardwood cabinet to hide the ugly pile-o-technology that is our telemusicavisual "system," we are also the type of family who can't even afford the much-less-costly (yet still quite...costly), considerably less charming "entertainment center" cabinet offered by the good people at the Pottery Barrel Crate Barn.

But although we are regularly treated by direct-mail marketers as if we have a lot of money to throw away on high-end crap, the purveyors of the low-end-crap know where we live, too. And thus Theresa and I found ourselves thumbing the tiny-images-packed pages of the Home Decorators Collection catalog.

This artifact, which we receive pretty regularly in the mail, is where the rubber of desperate homeowner acquisitiveness meets the road of American single-income-family finances. Jammed brazen cheek by "wood composite" jowl on page after page, the merch in the HDC catalog ranges from doesn't-look-so-bad-considering-it's-under-one-fifty to you-have-got-to-be-kidding-me.

In our (entirely pointless) search for the "budget alternative" in furniture buying, we found terrifying "wall art", the Banana Tree Lamp, the Hand Sofa and this, in regard to which the catalog helpfully notes, "no hunting involved." We found some of the featured items so viscerally disturbing that we had to turn away. Others just gave us something to think about.

(And -- OK, yeah -- we're thinking of buying this for a coffee table.)

Recent Sightings.

It's a beautiful day out there, so let's dispense with this quickly and meet up for Lawn Darts at Scott's house...

In 1838, the Englishman Samuel Birley Rowbotham performed experiments along the Old Bedford River in Cambridgeshire. He then included additional research in an 1845 pamphlet which drew its title (as the later organization devoted to his ideas proclaimed) from a Greek word meaning "seeker," and gave public lectures advocating his views, which caused concern among the scientific and religious establishment. In 1870 one of his followers laid down £500 in a challenge to scientists to re-test Rowbotham's observations, and Alfred Russel Wallace, the famous advocate of evolution, took him up on it, but the outcome of the wager remained in dispute, with a British court refusing to take sides. Three years later, branches of an organization championing Rowbotham's views were founded in Great Britain and New York City, using the Greek term borrowed from Rowbotham's original publication. In 1956, General Secretary Samuel Sheldon changed its name, removing its Greek-root appellation and substituting a name more familiar to all of us. The organization grew in size in the 1970's, although the death of its last leader in 2001 has left its future, according to my sources, in doubt.

What was the name of the organization after it was changed in 1956?

First correct answer posted to comments wins a posable Thomas L. Friedman action figure (Tom's Dream Lexus and Olive TreeHouse not included). No Googling or embarking on a Flowers for Algernon style project of mental superhumanization. One guess per comment, but please comment as often as you like.

I haven't looked at Ask Metafilter in a while, so I just found this thread from about a week ago on doing effective Google searching. So worth bookmarking, at least until you've memorized all the crafty little trickses.

Much as I frequently admire tabloid headlines, sometimes it's the opening line of the story itself which causes one to weep with admiration. Although I am sure that everyone else in the universe is already very tired of the coverage of Courtney Love's recent uncoverage, how can we dismiss the inestimable contribution to the history of language offered by this morning's Page Six. While the headline sports the wanly eye-catching pun "Courtney's Breast Friend," the first paragraph opens with a phrase that quite simply made everyone's morning around here: Skanks for the mammaries. I could marvel over the lowest-brow beauty of that for days and days. What I love most is that it eschews any literal gloss -- the double-tweak on the Bob Hope phrase (boldly invoked simply 'cuz it sounded good) rises straight to the level of poetry. Let us praise the editor who admitted its beauty and let it pass, untrammelled by conventional demands for a clear subject and verb, into our grateful ears.

With apologies for a late start, here's today's mental mushfest:

The following references are from articles in New York, Phildadelphia and California media, published in the fall of 1973. They all concern a particular product created by a Brooklyn-based company which, although originally introduced (with not much success) some years earlier, had become in '73, after a slight but crucial modification, a consumer sensation.

"Since their introduction last March, they have popped up in town after city in an avalanche of small-fry adulation."

"'If I say it's educational, parents buy it but the kids will have nothing to do with it. Then you've got troubles.'"

What was the product?

Bonus clue: visual references to the product (in the form of a t-shirt in one and a poster in the other) appeared in The Bad News Bears and Dog Day Afternoon.

First correct answer posted to comments wins a set of three slightly scuffed air hockey pucks, each the color of the cloudless sky as seen above Phoenix, Arizona, on the first day of spring. No Googling or asking the old guy who lives upstairs with the stacks and stacks of old magazines and 8-track tapes and the little yappy dog. Anyway, it smells funny in there. One guess per comment, please, but you may comment as often as you like.

David Brooks goes all "Chamberlain!" on the Spanish electorate. It's strange to read Brooks -- I keep expecting him to make sense, and he never quite does. In last year's Jocks vs. Geeks take on SUVs in the Wall Street Journal, Brooks offered to reduce all environmental and safety concerns about the suberabundance of sport utes to "You nerds are just jealous." Of course, it was probably an attempt at humor: but attempting to find the signs of intentional comedy in a Brooks piece is hard work and gives me a headache (the opposite case: finding the signs of intentional comedy in a Maureen Dowd op-ed is no problem, but trying to make yourself laugh will make your stomach hurt).

This time, he's offering us the New York Post's style of conservative scolding. Did the Spanish people willfully elect the Socialists in a disgraceful attempt to placate Al Queda after the Madrid bombing? After insisting with super-sincerity that he is "resisting that conclusion," he manfully admits that he doesn't know jack about Spanish politics and therefore what really swung the vote away from the incumbent Conservatives, who had been ahead in the polls. Yet such ignorance is no obstacle to the seeker of truth here: "But I do know that reversing course in the wake of a terrorist attack is inexcusable. I don't care what the policy is. You do not give terrorists the chance to think that their methods work. You do not give them the chance to celebrate victories."

Now, Dave may be confused about the difference between an administration and the nation as a whole. (Bush partisans in this country seem to have that problem.) If that's the case, then any change of administration would be a "change of course" and therefore a mistake. When terrorism strikes, everyone should get in line, stay with the program, and re-elect the sitting administration just to teach the terrorists a lesson. That's consistent enough. But if he's not, he apparently wants to have his credible-journalist cake and eat it too: the only people in the electorate who didn't "stay the course" (that is, vote for whom they were going to before the attacks) were the very swing voters whom Brooks admits he doesn't know anything about. So, what caused their "swing" (their "reversing of course") is the very issue -- the thing that would tell us whether they were upright in the face of terror or desperately waving una bandera blanca*. But Brooks clearly means that it was in the end "inexcusable" to elect the Socialists, because the terrorists will then believe their methods will work. Which means that it doesn't matter WHAT the motivations of the swing voters were -- they were wrong in any case! Appeasers-by-default!

As long as we're talking about Brooks, there's a brand-new issue of Harper's in which Thomas Frank takes an axe to the rotten rhetorico-ideological edifice that is the Red States/Blue States myth. It isn't online, yet. The whole damned issue, however, is worth the price of purchase.

*Scott, as always, is charged with checking my Spanish vocabulary.

With apologies for last week's cancellation, we arrive at the 100th instance of our weekly exercise in silly factoid-mongering. Although we shall get to the question without further ado, allow your editor to take this opportunity to thank each and every one of you for making this communal work-avoidance-fest possible.

And now, the 100th neuron-waster, in which we return -- as ever -- to the far-out world of 19th-century America:

In 1846, the engineer George Geddes persuaded some of his fellow townsmen in Salina, N.Y., to create a company and make real his idea (following examples already existing in Canada) to build one of these out of wood. A craze followed, and within a decade there were over three hundred companies in New York doing similar work with wood, and a thousand of them across the U.S. But well before the century ended, the practice of using wood to make the thing in question had passed entirely away (there was one last one located in Queens, N.Y., but it vanished in the 1880s). An entirely different set of materials for making the same thing came into popularity.

What was it that Geddes' company built?

First correct answer posted to comments wins the pear on top of my fridge that mysteriously refuses to ripen. No Googling or summoning the Holy Spirit. One guess per comment, please, but you may comment as often as you like.

The (urgh) Book Babes Ellen Heltzel and Margo Hammond are at it again, with another frenzied leap into the silly-to-other-people debates which occupy the book world. I should just ignore this stuff, I know. It's harmless chatter. But there's such an aura of knowingness inscribed in its baffling missing-of-the-point that I feel compelled to blow off a little steam. Read on, if you're not already asleep...

This week's column seems to build off their scoop back in January, in which their interview with Bill Keller of the New York Times produced the impression that Keller planned to spruce up the moribund Book Review (no argument here) with the excitement of more reviews of James Patterson thrillers and nonfiction, and kick the lit-fiction out the back door. He also took the opportunity to slap the publishing industry's "spin and whining."

The interview got widely circulated, Keller had to defend himself against charges that he was talking about dumbing down the NYTBR (and it certainly came across that way in the article -- Keller did not claim that he was misquoted, but implied that somehow magical pixies had changed his words to make them come off mean-sounding), and Heltzel and Hammond...well, the curious thing there is that they come off, in the article, as nodding their heads, catching the Big Man's meaning, and dutifully transcribing it for those of us eager to know how our Cultural Leaders are going to alter course. Their tone suggested that they bought Keller's entire rationale, and wrapped up with a conclusion that the choice the Times' had was between "fostering debate" and "nurturing imaginative writing." The choice, it appeared, was obvious: the manly editor simply had to foster debate, and leave the nurturing to someone else. The notion that this was a questionable summary of the available options did not seem to strike the writers.

The latest column, which pretends to ask the question "Are book critics too label-conscious for their own good?" is another dance with a succession of straw-man partners, the tune called by their interviewees, Random House's Stuart Applebaum and Grove/Atlantic's Morgan Entrekin. In this case, nobody says anything earthshaking -- Applebaum makes noises about the unhealthy nature of a "class war" that pits "John Steinbeck against John Grisham." This is an odd choice -- not only did Oprah resurrectEast of Eden just last year; moreover, the man who wrote Travels with Charley has always been squarely within the precincts of saleability. Heltzel, who takes responsibility for this section, adds mysteriously:

But Applebaum makes a good point when he argues that the media categorizes fiction too readily into one of two groups, "literary" or "commercial." As Applebaum kept reminding us: "Publishing well and publishing profitably are not mutually exclusive."

It's also possible to be both energetic and relaxed, white with a sense of rythym, well-educated and clueless. Such pronouncements have a nice ring to them, but they ought to leave one feeling that something more difficult is probably being avoided.

I won't gloss the "slightly different view" offered by Morgan Entrekin -- it doesn't tell us much more than Applebaum (and catch Margo Hammond on Applebaum and Entrekin as "yin and yang" -- one works in a midtown skyscraper, the other off of Union Square Park! Could the opposition be any more meaningful and complete?). The summing up is where the fun is:

What's a reviewer to do? Well, maybe the right answer is: Do NOT defend the status quo. We may be so inside the Book Beltway that we're part of the problem instead of the solution. We write too much about marginal books that enhance book publishing's precious image, and too little about the form and substance of fiction that catches the popular imagination. This becomes a problem for publishers of any size.

The number of questions begged here is so large that one doesn't know where to begin, except maybe with an exasperated sigh. What defines a book as marginal? How can we tell the difference between something that "catches the popular imagination" and something that sells because it looks enough like something else that more or less successfully rips off something else that is a pretty blatant copy of something that catches the popular imagination? Should book reviews contain schematic diagrams of how to construct an ideal technothriller, with notes on how Deception Point contains narrative effficiencies which Tom Clancy's latest fails to incorporate?

Whatever...what boggles the mind is the insistence on overlooking a simple truth: the main reason reviewers aren't spending a lot of time glossing the plots of the latest thrillers, throwaway chick-lit pamphlets, or sub-Oprah relationship sagas is that to do so would be INHUMANLY DULL. As long as the front of the bookstores are crammed with stuff that's turned out as if from a lathe, there's not going to be much journalistic juice in the passionate appreciation of each and every narrato-replicon.

Finally, this should put the nail in the credibility coffin -- Hammond: "I don't think even Doubleday could have predicted the success of the "The Da Vinci Code." " Then her colleague: "And I'm glad you bring up Brown's book, because, for critics, it's a humbling example of a book that took off like a rocket for factors other than the reviews...To begin with, the in-house support was fantastic. And it wasn't just chatter: Doubleday was so behind this book that it sent out 10,000 advance reading copies, four times the standard number. In spite of this obvious enthusiasm, The New York Times Book Review didn't cover it (although Janet Maslin did in the daily New York Times)."

This "obvious enthusiasm" is the enthusiasm of the PUBLISHER for its PRODUCT about which it was, see above, EXTRAORDINARILY DILIGENT in communicating to the general public. To insist that the NYTBR missed the boat when it failed to review a slightly learned potboiler that was ingeniously sold as the Next Big Thing is defensible, if in my view wrongheaded. To mistake a determined marketing campaign for "the popular imagination" should get your journalistic licence revoked.

There. I feel better.

Scott "Bob Hope" Williams, the man whose insightful digressions bring tears of joy and outrage to you every Friday, wants you to Shave Him Bald! It's for a good cause. No, really, it is.

It's quite nice that Harper's now has a website. Such pieces as this deserve dissemination beyond those of us willing to pay for our month's helping of Laphamania.

The 100th edition of the infamous Friday Quiz will be delayed, due to circumstances etcetera etcetera. Quiz 100 will appear next Friday.

In the meanwhile, I nominate for the title of song-lyric-that-now-sounds-the-silliest-even-though-it-probably-didn't-at-time-of-writing, "Never seen you lookin' so sad, my funky one."

The New York State Court system's juror orientation video begins with Ed Bradley voice-overing the phrase "In olden times..." as a sub-History Channel re-enactment of a trial by ordeal takes place (shmuck tossed into lake as stern-faced dudes in cloaks and robes look on). Ed queries: "Does this look like justice to you?"

As you wait to be selected for a jury, you will occupy spaces which are nearly Platonic examples of the general category "waiting room." In one, row upon row of wooden pews fill a wedding-reception-sized, sunless room, facing a handsome, elevated podium, upon which a bored court officer reads the Daily News.

Once you have finished every scrap of your own newspaper, and have discovered that the novel in your possession is not, contrary to rumor, going to set Spanish literature on its oído, you have an excellent opportunity to catch up on The View by watching the pillar-mounted televisions. If you anticipate having trouble seeing the closed captions, bring opera glasses. Also, you'll find yourself hypnotized by the current ad campaign for Febreeze, which is apparently an attempt to legitimize huffing!

After a while, someone will mispronounce your name over the PA system, and you will file into a tiny room, which is a nearly Platonic example of the general category of "claustrophobic spaces." Here you will undergo "voir dire" (although you will not be told how to spell it). Although the attorneys on both sides of the exciting personal injury case in question are ostensibly here to ask you questions and figure out if you will be an impartial juror, they may also take this opportunity to make speeches about such things as "stare decesis," (you won't get a spelling there, either) and how they just want people who will "rely on your own common sense" and "just apply the law as the judge gives it to you." If you would not like to serve on this jury, take this opportunity to point out to the attorney that he seems to be asking for an oxymoronic combination of independence and subservience.

When your case eventually comes to trial, be prepared to learn valuable life lessons from the events you hear about from the witnesses. The most important of these: if you are on the witness stand, and the opposition lawyer, over your own attorney's strenuous objections, introduces into evidence the fact that you have been convicted of smoking dope in public, it is not necessary to counter his suggestion that this makes you unreliable by insisting that you don't smoke the stuff -- you merely sell it!

TIP FOR LAWYERS INVOLVED IN TRAFFIC CASES: Don't come to work without visual aids. The words "traveling northbound along" are enough to make even the most dedicated juror immediately and irrecoverably drowsy, particularly when Spring is practically bustin' out all over outside the half-glazed window.

Finally, you will deliver your verdict and be discharged with the thanks of the court, or more specifically of a judge who looks and sounds remarkably like Detective Sipowicz, but mellowed out a little. When you leave, the attorneys will want to talk to you about the case and how they did, and happy defendants may come up and want to shake your hand. If, as it happens, you didn't come away liking anyone involved in the whole squalid little affair, it's not necessary to stand there and be polite and answer questions. Unless, like me, you have absolutely no spine whatsoever.