I’ve gotten this forwarded to me a few times. It’s a pyramid-scheme email aimed at reducing gas prices through a massive boycott of the oil companies that set gas prices. Despite the email’s assurances, I’m pretty confident that this harebrained plan is doomed to fail. I guess my point, primarily, is this: please don’t forward these emails to friends or family.

Date: Thu, 20 Apr 2006 16:13:38 -0700 (PDT)
From: EMAIL ADDRESS REDACTED
Subject: Gas Prices

GAS WAR – an idea that WILL work
This was originally sent by a retired Coca Cola executive It came from one
of his engineer buddies who retired from Halliburton. It’s worth your
consideration.
Join the resistance! I hear we are going to hit close to $ 4.00 a gallon by
next summer and it might go higher!

Want gasoline prices to come down? We need to take some intelligent, united
action.
Phillip Hollsworth offered this good idea. This makes MUCH MORE SENSE than
the “don’t buy gas on a certain day” campaign that was going around last
April or May! The oil companies just laughed at that because they knew we
wouldn’t continue to “hurt” ourselves by refusing to buy gas. It was more of
an inconvenience to us than it was a problem for them. BUT, whoever thought
of this idea, has come up with a plan that can really work. Please read on
and join with us!
By now you’re probably thinking gasoline priced at about $1.50 is super
cheap. Me too! It is currently $2.79 for regular unleaded in my town. Now
that the oil companies and the OPEC nations have conditioned us to think
that the cost of a gallon of gas is CHEAP at $1.50 – $1.75, we need to take
aggressive action to teach them that BUYERS control the marketplace..not
sellers. With the price of gasoline going up more each day, we consumers
need to take action. The only way we are going to see the price of gas come
down is if we hit someone in the pocketbook by not purchasing their gas!
And, we can do that WITHOUT hurting ourselves.
How?
Since we all rely on our cars, we can’t just stop buying gas. But we CAN
have an impact on gas prices if we all act together to force a price war.
Here’s the idea: For the rest of this year, DON’T purchase ANY gasoline from
the two biggest co (which now are one), EXXON and MOBIL. If they are not
selling any gas, they will be inclined to reduce their prices. If they
reduce their prices, the other companies will have to follow suit. But to
have an impact, we need to reach literally millions of Exxon and Mobil gas
buyers. It’s really simple to do! Now, don’t wimp out on me at this
point…keep reading and I’ll explain how simple it is to reach millions of
people!!
I am sending this note to 30 people. If each of us send it to at least ten
more (30 x 10 = 300) … and those 300 send it to at least ten more (300 x
10 = 3,000)…and so on, by the time the message reaches the sixth group of
people, we will have reached over THREE MILLION consumers.
If those three million get excited and pass this on to ten friends each,
then 30 million people will have been contacted! If it goes one level
further, you guessed it….. THREE HUNDRED MILLION PEOPLE!!!
Again, all you have to do is send this message to 10 people. That’s all!
(If you don’t understand how we can reach 300 million and all you have to do
is send this to 10 people…. Well, let’s face it, you just aren’t a
mathematician. But I am…so trust me on this one.) :-)
How long would all that take? If each of us sends this e-mail out to ten
more people within one day of receipt, all 300 MILLION people could
conceivably be contacted within the next 8 days!!! I’ll bet you didn’t think
you and I had that much potential, did you! Acting together we can make a
difference.
If this makes sense to you, please pass this message on. I suggest that we
do not buy gas from EXXON/MOBIL UNTIL THEY LOWER THEIR PRICES TO THE $1.30
RANGE AND KEEP THEM DOWN. THIS CAN REALLY WORK.

An architect designed and renovated his son’s New York loft apartment, maximizing the space in some ingenious ways. They managed to get two floors and a guest bedroom into a loft under 700 square feet with 12 foot ceilings! The pictures that flash by in the slideshow on this page are okay, but the Dwell magazine article (pdf) is terrific. I just spent 15 minutes I can’t really afford reading it and marvelling at the pictures.

It’s almost enough to make one want to borrow a ton of money and invest it in an awesome fancy modernist loft. But not quite.

David Copperfield was robbed at gunpoint, but he showed the thugs his empty pockets and they left. Of course, his empty pockets held his wallet, cell phone, and keys–but the criminals didn’t know that. Magic always wins, folks. [kottke]

Here are some thoughts on the last few episodes of West Wing, and on Aaron Sorkin:

West Wing first. As most of you surely know, West Wing is going off the air at the end of this, its seventh season. Like I told calamityjon, the first four seasons of West Wing were sublime. Just terrific drama with vibrant characters, complex and rewarding storylines, and dialogue a step above that found in its prime time peers.

Then they fired Aaron Sorkin, the writer/producer/creator of the show–something about his week-long hallucinagen-fueled vision quests getting in the way of his turning in scripts in a timely manner. The show went to crap immediately thereafter, wherein it languished for a couple of seasons. Things got really bad when they put John Wells, the ER producer, on the case–all of a sudden every week somebody got caught in a car bomb or a helicopter crash or a kidnapping.

I kept tuning in, though, out of some misguided loyalty to its long dead or dormant greatness. After a year or two, ratings plummeted–probably because the show wasn’t enjoyable anymore–and I guess they gave up on trying to get people to watch and just get back to making a nerdy, politically-charged, drama about the White House. And unfortunately they were apparently right to give up on attracting viewers, because although the series improved a lot, getting back up to what I’d quantify as 70% of Sorkin-level quality, it continued to garner Arrested Development-level ratings.

Which is all a logorrheic way of saying: everybody stopped watching so they decided to cancel the show.

This season’s episodes have a lame duck feel to them, therefore, and the writers have apparently decided to delight the show’s long-time fans at the expense of bothering to maintain any kind of dramatic integrity. You know how lots of sitcoms and dramas have characters who have a huge amount of sexual tension, but if they ever got together it would be the beginning of the end? I’m thinking here of Sam and Rebecca, Maeby and George Michael, or, I don’t know, Brandon and Andrea. Anyway, on West Wing those roles were shared by both Josh/Donna and C.J./Danny, and the writers did a great job of maintaining the tension for the whole of the series run. Oh, until they found out the show was cancelled, at which point they managed to get both couples into bed together ASAP. I’m torn, because it is nice to see the characters happy and, you know, sassified, but come on. If it made sense for the characters not to get together up until this point, how reasonable is it for it to happen now? In my opinion, not so reasonable. But you know, this is basically fan-fiction writ large, a reward for those of us foolish enough to watch this show every week for seven years. I guess I can live with it.

Also, the writers had to deal with the death of actor John Spencer, who played Leo McGarry and was to have played a major role in the conclusion of the series. I think they did a good job with a tough situation, and of course his real death lent the show a bit of pathos that no artificial plot point could have.

As for Santos, the new Democratic nominee who won the election a couple of episodes back: who cares? I mean, as I understand it Jimmy Smits is a handsome man, and I’ll admit that he makes a decent jedi, but I find it difficult in the extreme to make any kind of emotional or intellectual connection to the fictitious future happenings of a world that I know will end for me in 3 weeks–especially the future happenings of characters I was only introduced to a year ago. Does anybody feel strongly about the fact that Santos edged out Vinick in an extremely close election that came down to Oregon? Yeah, I didn’t think so.

What do we care about? We care about the characters we’ve been following for the better part of a decade: Toby, C.J., Donna, Josh, Charlie and Jed–and, to a lesser degree, Abby, Mallory, Margaret, Amy, poor beleaguered Will Bailey, Huck and Molly, Joey Lucas, Danny Concannon, and Nancy McNally. Thankfully, it looks like the last few episodes will focus on these characters and their futures, which we will never see (barring an ill-advised spinoff).

Speaking of which, goddamn–it sure is great to see Sam Seaborn again. I know Rob Lowe felt he had his reasons for leaving, and considering the disaster that was Sorkin’s departure I can’t say he made a mistake; but the show was far worse off without him, and it’s not like he did his career any favors by leaving his most successful role in years to head some third-tier legal drama that collapsed in a month.

Okay, so I don’t have any solid conclusion to this rambling mess. I guess I’ll just say that I’m sad to see West Wing go, even if it is a shadow of its former self. And I’m gratified that so many characters that disappeared for years (hello, Ainsley!) are making brief cameos. And I’m disappointed, though not surprised, that Sorkin declined to play any role in finishing up the show that will probably be his greatest legacy.

Speaking of Sorkin: he is weird. Like, I love both Sports Night and WW, but when I get all psyched about introducing someone else to one or the other (especially Sports Night) and we’re sitting there watching, sometimes it’s almost painful. I am confronted suddenly with the awkwardness of Sorkin’s dialogue or the contrivance of his plots. And I notice how many of his jokes are about domestic violence, or how many of his characters have drinking problems. I recognize lines he liked so much that he used them again and again. I see the plaintive earnestness with which he has his characters mouth his own liberal opinions, and it’s discomfiting in the extreme.

And yet, I think that a lot of these flaws are made obvious only by familiarity. And each is outweighed by a concomitant virtue. So I’m glad that Sorkin’s got a new show coming out in the fall, and I look forward to hearing more of the same tired dialogue, the same character archetypes, the same endless pedeconferencing shots, the same musical montages, the same ardent sermons, and the same damn jokes based on saying some dumb phrase over and over until the words have lost all meaning.

I am pretty busy lately, but I am not too busy to note that Anna will be making a return to the OC tonight. That’s right, the saucy minx from the 909 of the East is back! Granted, I couldn’t stand her, but at this point I’d even be willing to entertain the idea of another appearance by Oliver, the self-flagellating mental patient. This show has gone from bad to embarrassingly-awful. Maybe Anna harbinges a return to form.

But probably not.

Chuck Klosterman writes the occasional column for ESPN (the Magazine, sometimes, the website, sometimes… probably for ESPN Mobile sometimes), and his stuff is often an enjoyable melange of pop culture and sports and politics and philosophy and sociology. The column that got put up today is probably the best thing he’s written for them, and that’s despite the fact that its subject is a depressing cliché that anyone who reads about sports is already sick to death of: Barry Bonds, Steroid Abuser. I am so tired of reading these stories, which mostly condemn Barry but sometimes extend that condemnation to Society as a Whole, but Kolsterman manages to make the topic a launching-off point for a larger critique of this crazy country that somehow seems fresh and insightful. But also, funny:

We are all familiar with the story of Babe Ruth; it’s the classic American narrative. He was born inside a burning saloon. As a teen, he was persuaded to become a southpaw pitcher through the guidance of a priest impressed by the boy’s ability to consume entire turkeys during brunch. As he matured, Ruth found he was able to hit 600-foot home runs for dying children without the use of a bat. His on-field excellence was punctuated by an ability to drink whole kegs of beer while making love to nine women simultaneously, none of whom was his wife. When the Red Sox traded his rights to the Yankees, 560 people died in a mud slide. Ruth served as Warren G. Harding’s secretary of state, albeit briefly. He also weighed in the neighborhood of 18,000 pounds and once won a best-of-three-falls wrestling match against Man o’ War, the horse he later ate.

Now that is good and hilarious writing. Read the rest.

Also, what happens if you make a cake but use Cadbury Creme Eggs instead of the standard chicken kind? Hilarity! [A Whole Lotta Nothing]

Just click here immediately to see a kitten in a milk bath. It’s awesome. Although I’m not really sure there’s any milk involved. [kottke]

Apparently there are ongoing talks between free agent and ex-Redskin LaVar Arrington and the New York Giants. LaVar has expressed his desire to stay within the NFC East. Nice work antagonizing a violent game-changing dynamo, Redskins. WAY TO PISS OFF A PSYCHOPATH.