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Sometimes you just get lucky.

On Saturday, I took the car in for maintenance. There was a snafu involving a mislabeled box from a parts supplier that closed earlier than the shop, and I was left with a complimentary rental car for the weekend.

On Sunday, an Ikea catalog arrived with the paper, and Katie spotted some nice, reasonably-priced patio furniture. So we descended upon the tiny rental car (a Hyundai Accent) with a tape measure, and a few hours later our balcony actually looked like someone lived in the apartment.

After I got the car back on Monday, I lowered the back seats to see just how big the opening to the trunk was. And despite the fact that it’s a larger car (a Nissan Sentra), there’s no way we could ever have fit the box in there.

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OK, one of my pet peeves is people who refuse to walk 50 feet out of their way to a crosswalk, instead dashing across a busy street where cars are more likely to hit them (or swerve and hit other cars, buildings, etc.)

But the number of people who jaywalk from the courthouse to the Starbucks across the street just amazes me. Especially since the courthouse is at the corner. The point where people cross the street is close enough to the intersection that the left turn lane has already opened up.

I mean, talk about a triumph of laziness over self-preservation. Saving ten seconds vs. risking life and limb? And flagrantly violating traffic laws in front of the courthouse?

I just don’t get it.

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It seems that Benton County, Oregon, has decided to stop issuing any marriage licenses until the state makes up its mind who can and can’t get married. For now, straight couples in the area will have to go to the next county over to get married.

The rationale, of course, is that they “need to treat everyone in our county equally” — even if it’s not clear whether they’re allowed to let one class of people marry.

So I suppose gay marriage can negatively impact straight marriage after all: (1) Longer lines at the courthouse might deter spur-of-the-moment weddings. (2) Confuse the clerks enough, and they’ll just throw up their hands and say “Come back tomorrow!”

Not that either is likely to happen here in über-conservative OC, but I am glad we’ve already picked up our license.

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A few weeks ago I was looking at the website error logs and noticed some attempts to access images with names like /flash/images/%20%20%20%20%20%20%20ans3.jpg. I got around to looking at it today, and all of them are the same name, all of them from browsers looking at my profile of the Teen Titans, which includes an image called teentitans3.jpg.

I finally realized what’s going on. Some moronic filter has broken up the name not as “teen titans” but as “teen tit ans,” decided it must be porn, and replaced the “offending” words with spaces (%20 is the code for a space in a URL).

It really makes me wonder how badly mangled the page looks to these people, especially if it turns out that every instance of the team’s name gets pointlessly erased.

Further reading: The Censorware Project, Peacefire, Electronic Frontier Foundation.

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For those who are wondering, we’re still in the process of registering. We’ve got a partial registry at Target so far, and by the end of the week, we’ll also be registered at Robinsons-May.

(It’s been kind of tricky, since we already have a lot of the things people tend to register for. You know, toasters and stuff. So we’re trying to choose things we haven’t gotten around to picking up, or things that are worth replacing with newer/better equivalents.)

We keep talking about registering at Fry’s, but we’re not sure they’d even have a wedding registry!

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Remember the song “How’s it Gonna Be” by Third Eye Blind? When it was new, a lot of high schools apparently chose it for the prom theme, proving that teenagers don’t actually listen to the lyrics (it’s a breakup song), which should mitigate parental concerns about explicit lyrics.

Anyway, Katie and I were talking about this the other day and started tossing around titles of songs that would be just plain wrong to play at a wedding reception.

  • You Oughta Know (Alanis Morissette)
  • Paradise by the Dashboard Light (Meat Loaf)
  • Song for the Dumped (Ben Folds)
  • Closer (Nine Inch Nails)
  • Brick (Ben Folds Five)
  • Playboy Mommy (Tori Amos)
  • Breakfast at Tiffany’s (Deep Blue Something)
  • Anything But Down (Sheryl Crow)
  • Back to Good (Matchbox 20)
  • Me and a Gun (Tori Amos)
  • Anything by Liz Phair
  • Best I Ever Had (Grey Sky Morning) (Vertical Horizon)
  • Guys Like Me (Aimee Mann)
  • Anything by Evanescence or Linkin Park
  • Melanie (“Weird Al” Yankovic)
  • Almost anything by They Might Be Giants
  • Don’t Stand So Close to Me (The Police)
  • Eleanor Rigby (The Beatles)
  • I Touch Myself (The Divinyls)
  • Anything by Rammstein
  • Gollum’s Song
  • Anything by the Chipmunks
  • I Don’t Like Mondays (Boomtown Rats)
  • Anything by Nirvana
  • I’m So Happy I Can’t Stop Crying (Sting)
  • King of Pain (The Police)
  • I’m Still Remembering (Cranberries)
  • One More Minute (“Weird Al” Yankovic)
  • If I Were Brave (Shawn Colvin)
  • Jumper (Third Eye Blind)
  • Yesterday (The Beatles)
  • Roxanne (The Police)
  • I’ll Never Tell (Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Once More With Feeling)
  • Anything by Garbage
  • Positively Fourth Street (Bob Dylan)
  • Torn (Natalie Imbruglia)
  • Taxi (Harry Chapin)
  • The Freshmen (Verve Pipe)
  • Power of Goodbye (Madonna)
  • Waitress (Tori Amos)
  • Total Eclipse of the Heart (Bonnie Tyler)
  • Uninvited (Alanis Morissette)
  • Unsent (Alanis Morissette)

We’re not sure about The Highwayman and Lady of Shalott (Loreena McKennit), since the subject matter is wrong, but they’re quiet and unobtrusive.

This is an open list – feel free to add your suggestions! The idea is not just to get something that isn’t appropriate, but something that’s especially inappropriate (breakup songs, twisted relationships, put-down songs, etc.)