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My coworker Kerry is a cofounder of The RumbleBox Coalition, a non-profit dedicated to supplying emergency kits to Bay Area residents for surviving the first 72 hours after a major earthquake (or other disaster). “RumbleBoxes” contain first aid supplies, food, water, a hand-cranked flashlight and radio, and more. The coolest part, and the thing that places me in awe of Kerry, is that RumbleBoxes are distributed free of charge to needy families; funding comes from donations and the sale of RumbleBoxes to the not-so-needy.

I bought mine yesterday and now instead of fearing the next big earthquake I’m almost looking forward to it! If you’re in a disaster-prone area (e.g., Earth) where there’s a chance you’ll be cut off from infrastructure or emergency services for a while, you should get one too.

Here are some of the top queries from various search engines that resulted in hits on my blog during the past year or so, reproduced verbatim from my server logs. (Last year’s results are here.) Each related family of queries is listed with a main variant in bold and selected other variants, plus the percentage of query-hits represented by that family.

I was at first surprised to see that hits for “James Bond villains” outnumbers hits for “vampire lesbian girl scouts” (etc.) and “sex” (etc.) combined, but then realized: the percentages are a function both of the popularity of that search and of the ranking of my site in the search results. In other words, if you’re looking for anything about vampires or lesbians or sex I regret to say there are a lot of likelier websites for you to visit before mine.

I finally got my Honda Fit, the Out on a Whim.

It wasn’t easy to find one; in the end, I needed the help of Cartelligent, whose superior service I recommend very highly. At the time I engaged them, my Cartelligent agent, the wonderful Leigh Taylor, informed me (credibly) that there were a total of four Honda Fits in the state of California matching my modest criteria (trim level “Sport,” manual transmission). I picked one and they negotiated a price for me, handled most of the paperwork, and transported it to their office in nearby Sausalito, where I took delivery from Leigh a few weeks ago. To top it all off, they found a buyer for the Nimble Imp, my nine-year-old Honda Civic, at about three times the price I expected it to command.

The Nimble Imp, a red 1998 Honda Civic DX hatchback, was the first purchase I made with Amazon.com money after they bought the Internet Movie Database.

It replaced the Compelling Notion, a red 1994 Saturn SC2, which was my first new car.

That came after the Uffish Thought, the gold 1984 Toyota Corolla hatchback in which Alex and I crossed America.

Before that was the Fine Young Chap, a blue 1984 Toyota Corolla sedan. It was named for a comment made about me by the father of my friend Drue, and it was totaled in a four-car collision on the Belt Parkway in Brooklyn (about which more in a future blog post).

That followed the storied Plate-O-Shrimp, a yellow 1977 VW Rabbit, my first college car, memorialized here.

During the few months before college I had the Beta Epsilon, a white 1974 Pontiac Le Mans, a gift from my dad’s fiancée, now my stepmother. It was named in loving memory of…

…the Brief Encounter, my first car, a green 1972 Oldsmobile Cutlass Supreme, given to me on extended loan by my friend Joelle, who bought it for herself without knowing how to drive, on the condition that I place myself at her disposal for transportation errands, which I was only too glad to do. It was smelly, it was rusty, it was moldy, and it was missing its gas pedal (you had to press your foot on the bare push-rod), but as Jack Sparrow points out, “It’s not just a keel and a hull and a deck and sails, that’s what a ship needs, but what a ship is… is freedom.”

Thinking of upgrading your conventional picture-tube TV to a fancy new flat-panel widescreen? But you’re on a budget and don’t want to go overboard? Confused about what size TV to buy? You’ve come to the right place.

The main criterion for choosing a screen size is one that I have not seen described in other TV buying guides: viewing area. The viewing area of a 32″ conventional TV is 492 square inches, whereas the viewing area of a 32″ widescreen TV is a mere 438 square inches! If you’re upgrading from a 32″ conventional TV you’ll want at least a 34″ widescreen to get the same viewing area.

Here’s how I arrived at those figures.

The advertised size of a TV display is the length of the diagonal. If from the diagonal we can determine the height of the display, h, and the width, w, then the viewing area is h×w. Thanks to Pythagoras we know that h²+w² = 32². But this isn’t enough information to determine the viewing area: we also need the fact that the aspect ratio of most conventional TV displays is 4:3, which means the width of the display is four-thirds the height.

Substituting 4h/3 for w and then simplifying gives us:

h²+(4h/3)² = 32²
h²+16h²/9 = 32²
25h²/9 = 32²
h = √(9×32²/25)
h = 3×32/5 = 19.2

Plugging that into the formula for viewing area (h×w) and recalling that w = 4h/3,

h×4h/3 = 19.2×4×19.2/3 = 491.52 square inches

Knowing that the aspect ratio of widescreen displays is 16:9 and using similar arithmetic gives a result of 438 square inches for a 32″ diagonal.

In fact, the math shows that for a given diagonal, the viewing area of a 16:9 display will always be about 11% less than the viewing area of a 4:3 display.

But wait! It’s not as simple as finding the widescreen TV that has at least the same viewing area as your conventional TV. You should also take into account the kinds of programming you watch.

Do you watch a lot of wide-format movies on your 4:3 TV? If so, you’ve certainly noticed the “letterboxing” needed to fit the wide aspect ratio of the film into the narrow one of the display. You’re not using the entire viewing area; some of it is wasted, as much as 32% of it for very wide format formats such as “CinemaScope.” With a 16:9 TV the need for letterboxing wide-format movies is decreased or eliminated.

Similarly, if you watch a lot of conventional TV programming (sitcoms, newscasts, etc.) on a widescreen TV, you’ll get “reverse letterboxing,” also called pillar boxing, where the black bars appear not on the top and bottom but on the left and right of the image to make the taller aspect ratio fit into a shorter one. Here again you’re wasting some of your viewing area.

So think about the kinds of programming you watch and consult this handy table that shows the true image size (in square inches) for various combinations of TV diagonal size, TV aspect ratio, and programming aspect ratio. Choose a TV that gives you the best image size you can afford for the types of programming you typically watch.

The one I’ve been waiting for!

Too excited! Must… maintain… composure… in workplace!

I may be a “recovering Star Wars nerd,” but c’mon, man. Cool is cool.

Recently I discovered that Sony is planning a new in-dash car stereo with a USB port for reading and playing MP3 files from a thumb drive. I had an earlier such model but it got stolen. I replaced it with a JVC model that I don’t much like. (Among other things, its clock won’t display when the unit is switched off. And when it does show the time, occasionally the time display won’t update itself for many minutes in a row!) For someone with a long daily commute, a good car stereo is indispensable. So I’m interested in Sony’s latest and I have been checking Amazon periodically to see when it’ll be available to order.

While checking just now I discovered that Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows — the final book in the series — is now available to pre-order. Its just-announced release date is 21 July. Yay! Into the shopping cart. I’m proud to be among the first to pre-order it. Thanks to an automated recommendation I also discovered that Universal Hall Pass — Melissa Kaplan’s post-Splashdown band — has a new EP out. On it she collaborates with former Splashdown bandmate Kasson Crooker — yay! Into the shopping cart.

Today’s run of luck continues…

My car, the Nimble Imp, is a nine-year-old Honda Civic hatchback. On Thursday it wouldn’t start, so we towed it to a garage. On Friday we learned that it had a dead battery ($100) and a leaky clutch master cylinder ($600) — and that according to Edmunds, it’s worth $767, or $67 more than the cost of the repairs I’m facing.

On Saturday I began car shopping.

Fuel efficiency is my main criterion. I’m intrigued by the Toyota Prius — I’ve driven one and liked it — but the car I’m really after is the new Honda Fit. I have some lingering doubts about the Prius’s hybrid drive — just how long do those batteries last, anyway, and what is their true environmental impact? — whereas the Fit’s gas mileage is almost as good, its price is right, and it doesn’t have a distracting video display in the center of the dashboard. Only the name is a little off-putting. (I like its European name better: “Jazz.”) Yes, it’s tiny. No, I don’t have a problem with that. So I ordered the Consumer Reports price report and started calling Honda dealers to find one where I could test-drive a Fit.

Marin Honda didn’t have any. Neither did Honda of El Cerrito. Nor did the San Francisco, Berkeley, or Oakland Honda dealers. I called Walnut Creek Honda — no luck. I called Concord Honda — no. San Leandro, Burlingame, Hayward, Redwood City — no, no, no, no. At Vacaville Honda (42.7 miles distant) they thought they might have one or two on the lot and promised to check and call me back in five minutes. Mmmmmmmmmmno. I began to feel like I was living in the Cheese Shop sketch.

Glickstein: You do have some Hondas, don’t you?
Element: Certainly sir! This is a Honda shop, sir. We’ve got–
Glickstein: No, no, don’t tell me. I’m keen to guess.
Element: Fair enough.
Glickstein: Element?
Element: Yes.
Glickstein: Ah! Well I’ll buy one of those then.
Element: Oh, I thought you were talking to me, sir. Mr. Element, that’s my name.

It took a not-inconsiderable effort of will to psych myself into buying a car this weekend, but psych myself I did, and for a couple of hours on the phone Saturday morning I persisted in spite of the best efforts of Bay Area Honda salespeople uncharacteristically to prevent me giving them my money. But they finally wore me down, with the result that I authorized the $700 repair of my $767 car. I am “Fit” to be tied.