Conan is a top-notch ballbreaker and the nerds at Google are easy pickins. So fun to watch him free of the restraints of TV. Love it.

Guest: Crazy Aaron from Putty World. Topics: Teri Garr, New Putty Colors, Stereoscopic Photography, 3D Movies, New MacBooks, Android Phones, The Noid, Theremins, Tap Dancing, McCain’s Steve Martin Impression, Please Touch Museum, Yo Gabba Gabba. Visit: “Ultimate Washington Insider”. Playlist: Stuyvesant, Tilly and the Wall, Fredrik, Dillinger Four and The Black Kids (Daytrotter Session).

Preview: Russ declares, “I like dances.”

Play Now: http://www.usedwigs.com/pod/podcast53.mp3

Subscribe: iTunes

Website: www.usedwigsradio.com

Portable Car Jump Start System

Cordless Cellular Shades – Few things are more taxing for anal-retentive types than getting the ends of window shades perfectly even and balanced when hoisting them up using the old dual-string method. Worry no more Rain Man, help has arrived. I dig this simple, honeycomb shade design and am happily baffled by the amazing no-strings-attached technology. It should win a Nobel prize for practical science. Someone call Stockholm.

Resealable Oreo Package – When you absolutely must get your fat fingers in and out of the package quickly before your snoopy 3-year-old discovers what you’re up to in the dark corner of the kitchen.

Tiny URL – Ever send a link to someone (or post one in blog comment or Twitter) but it’s really really long, like an Amazon product link, and it just messes up everything and doesn’t work? Yeah, you stink. Fear not, there’s an awesome little Firefox add-on called TinyURL that creates a very short and practical URL, perfect for sharing. Just download, install, restart and start making compact links from the Firefox toolbar. Easy Peasy.

Trader Joe’s Sane Prices - My daughter loves Morningstar Farms Veggie Sausage Links, which is cool because they are yummy and good for her. What’s not cool? At Acme or Genuardis they are $5 a box! Holy Cowless! When fake meat products cost more than real meat something is just not right. Luckily, our hippie pals at Trader Joe’s sell them for $2.99 a box. How can they afford to do this? Who cares, they just do it, okay.

Also, for you dog owners who cannot afford Greenies anymore because those greedy, minty-breathed bastards raise their prices every week, Trader Joe’s has a good alternative. Check out their Mint-a-Breath Bones. They may not look or taste like the original (not sure, I haven’t tested them out), but they are much cheaper and my dumb pup loves them just the same.

Screw Cap Wine – No cork? How gauche! Sorry, after my rabbit wine opener broke I just don’t have the time, dexterity or strength anymore to deal with a pesky cork. Plus, the Missus and I have no problem draining a whole bottle if need be, so no recorking needed. Here’s my favorite screwy wine: Bonny Doon Ca’ del Solo Big House Red. Yep, I like cheap affordable red wine with pretty labels. (Remember that around the holidays when you’re gift shopping for your favorite nonsense providers).

Feedburner – If you have a website or blog, FeedBurner is a must. It “provides custom RSS feeds and management tools to bloggers, podcasters, and other web-based content publishers.” I love it because it’s fairly easy to integrate with WordPress and it makes subscribing to a website super easy. It also delivers a very nice daily email with our latest posts to our subscribers without us lifting a finger. Did I mention it’s free? I know, big bad Google now owns it, but they haven’t done much to mess it up yet. Here’s FeedBurner in action:

Subscribe to UsedWigs via Email

iStockPhoto – Need that awesome image of a smiling black businessman shaking hands with an equally happy white businessman for that new kick-ass business website you’re designing? Few years back, you’d have to pay around $100 to post that little masterpiece on your website, not anymore. iStockPhoto provides affordable royalty-free photos, some as low as a buck (I’d stay away from the dollar shots, go up to at least $5 for some quality)! They also have lots of really nice vector images. Pulling back the curtain time… many of stunning photos you see on this very site are not custom shots taken by high-priced photogs, I know, hard to believe. Most are from the iStock with just a smidgen of photoshopping. Some samples:

- Jeff Lyons

[NOTE: This quessay is cross-posted on HuffingtonPost.com]

*Big ups to Crispin Glover, who really should’ve run for president this year, and who once wrote an “essay” called “What Is It?” composed only of questions, with a subtly discernible anti-Steven Spielberg thrust to it. Subtly discernible, the way the media’s anti-Hillary Clinton bias is subtle. I’m paying homage to Glover’s genre*** and giving it a name**: Quessay (question essay). (Actually, so no one accuses me of stealing anyone else’s words, according to Google as of today ONE OTHER person, someone named Rockin80sChick4ever, has used the term quessay. And I think she meant something else.)

Why have we seen Chelsea Clinton but not Bill in the audience at the recent one-on-one debates, and why don’t Michelle Obama and her daughters ever appear at them?

Isn’t it strangely prophetic that Barack Obama, in his 2006 book The Audacity of Hope, after admitting his own “unusually — and at times undeservedly — positive press coverage,” (p. 120) cites only these two people as an example of right-wing bias in the media: “A vote or speech by Hillary Clinton that runs against type is immediately labeled calculating; the same move by John McCain burnishes his maverick credentials” (p. 124)?

What would you say if you knew Hillary’s mom’s married name and Barack’s mom’s maiden name both end in “-ham” (Rodham and Dunham respectively)? Are the Rodhams and the Dunhams related? Isn’t Barack Obama distantly related to the current vice president, Richard Bruce “Dick” Cheney?

Was Barack Obama’s maternal great-grandfather named Ralph Waldo Emerson Dunham? Did he die on October 4, 1970, the same day Janis Joplin died? Wasn’t Janis Joplin a drug addict?

Were rock stars Joplin, Jimi Hendrix and Jim Morrison (rumored to have been) killed by the U.S. government?

Do Hillary Clinton, Mamie Eisenhower, Spiro Agnew, Laura Bush, Ralph Nader, Pat Buchanan, the late Bobby Kennedy, Michael Dukakis, Howard Dean, Bill Richardson, Joe Biden, Scarlett Johansson, Condoleezza Rice, Billy Graham and Maria Shriver all share a zodiac sign (Scorpio)?

Do Barack Obama, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, Rosalynn Carter, Marilyn Quayle, Tipper Gore, Lynne Cheney, Bill Clinton, Phyllis Schlafly, Anita Hill, Fidel Castro, Loni Anderson, Caspar Weinberger, the late Jerry Falwell and Arnold Schwarzenegger all share a zodiac sign (Leo)?

Do scorpions sting themselves to death when cornered by an enemy, rather than be killed? Do lions roar a lot (“variations in intensity and pitch, rather than discrete signals, appear central to communication”****)?

Is it interesting that Barack H. Obama Sr. went to Harvard and earned a doctorate in economics, making Barack H. Obama Jr. a “legacy” student at Harvard? Did both Barack and Michelle Obama receive law degrees from Harvard, and did both Bill and Hillary Clinton receive law degrees from Yale? Who else went to Yale? Did any of Bill or Hillary Clintons’ parents attend Ivy League schools? Am I an Ivy League graduate? Was Bill Clinton the only person in his family of origin to attend college?

Is Barack Obama allowed, constitutionally, to pick Bill Clinton as his running mate?

Did Bill Clinton and Barack Obama’s fathers both die relatively young as a result of automobile accidents?

Do William J. Blythe III (Bill Clinton), John S. McCain III and Barack H. Obama II have numbers after their names that, all together, add up to eight (8), which is the same as the total combined number of books the three of them have been the top-billed authors of? Eight?

Does it surprise you that Hillary Clinton’s house in Washington, D.C., is the only one on the block with no house number displayed anywhere?

Where does Barack Obama live when he’s in D.C.? What’s his favorite restaurant? Is it the same restaurant favored by Richard Bruce “Dick” Cheney? If not, why not?

In their youths, didn’t Bill Clinton meet John F. Kennedy and Hillary Rodham meet Martin Luther King Jr.?

Will Barack Obama respond to those calling for him to pick Bill Clinton as his running mate?

**When I was in grad school I would make up words all the time, but one of my sour-faced professors (a German) tried to rid me of the habit by writing in the margin: “It’s not necessary to invent a new word for the purposes of a term paper.”

***I’m also paying homage to the lists of intriguingly paranoiac questions that certain commenters from both fringe ends of the political spectrum like to insert into comment sections (again and again). Except my quessay is different because I can spell.

****Schaller, George B. The Serengeti Lion: A Study of Predator-Prey Relations. University of Chicago Press, 1972. pp. 103-113. Via Wikipedia.

Read more SM SHRAKE at You Wanna Know What? and The Shrake-tionary.