“So even as the members of Occupy Wall Street seem unorganized and, at times, uninformed, their continued presence creates a vexing problem for the Police Department.” That’s the New York Times today, recounting how Occupy Wall Street is “VEXING” the NYPD, which is a BIZARRE take on what’s happening. (To be fair! Much of the NYPD is being friendly and good-humored about the ongoing protest downtown, as is their way. I like New York City cops!) But there are some cops who need to be fired and/or prosecuted. Like lady-macer Anthony Bologna. Hey, a word of advice to New York City’s government and police department? When you don’t take these things seriously, they fester. People get madder. Brushing off clearly documented and outlandish incidents by the NYPD, which is what the City is doing, will result in bad stuff.

Meanwhile, here is a very nice editorial from the Star-Ledger: “The nation should listen to this small Wall Street encampment, which arrives just as the president appears ready to stop coddling the rich. For one of the few times since the meltdown, there’s a group of Americans speaking on behalf of the other 99 percent.”

“The Army’s latest scheme to stop homemade bombs is pretty much inspired by “Knight Rider.’” True story! Robot car hates bombs! (“We’re not making KITT,” says the KITT-building company honcho, which obviously means the opposite. So this is how it all ends.)

Wow. WARNING: this website for this new gay bar HAS AUDIO AUTOPLAY, but here it is: Flaming Saddles. Mmm hmm. This is what job creation looks like! The press release is remarkable.

New York City has a new watering hole, FLAMING SADDLES, the new kick ass Country Western Gay Saloon, where the Bad to the Bone Bartenders strut their stuff (behind and on top of the bar) & always aim to please. Customers are advised that they best pull themselves up by your boot straps, put on their Tight Ass Jeans and boot scoot and boogie on over to the Wild Wild West Side of NYC. Saddle Up for a Yippee Ki Yay MotherTrucker of a Night!

Also there’s THIS PIECE OF ART in the press email!

Haha, word, fine, alright, see you there.

Sure, we hate the moon, but the sun is what’s really out to get us, as we just survived a G3 coronal mass ejection. The next one could DESTROY US ALL, apparently: “A ‘Space Katrina’ could be inevitable — at the very least we should be able to see it coming.” Mmm hmm, he said “Space Katrina.”

William Morrow/HarperCollins has pulled Neal Stephenson’s brand-new book, Reamde, off Amazon after, one would guess, getting tired of hearing about just how many errors there are in the e-book production. (It’s not clean.) Now the e-book version is no longer visible at all to U.S. visitors to Amazon, and appears as “unavailable in the U.S.” to mobile viewers. (This was first noticed late last night by Macworld editorial director Jason Snell.) Reamde is #36 in books overall on Amazon this morning, so removal of the e-book, even temporarily, is a serious financial choice. (The Kindle version was #6 on the Amazon scifi list, while the print/audio was at #4.) This being a Neal Stephenson book, the criticisms of the e-book errors were not outraged all-caps freakouts but mild and literate complaints left on the Amazon page.

Ha, it is probably not an arcane puzzle, but yeah I wouldn’t rule that out entirely either. Also? There’s no reason a clean PDF file can’t be made in this day and age… unless you’re making people do two jobs, or you never expanded the production department when digital became big, or if you have a bunch of harried kids doing the work of their bosses with no supervision.

Anyway, we look forward to a fresh copy! The book is really good so far. I’m only 16% of the way through. (That’s page 160, or “Location 3672 of 22930,” in the astoundingly dumb Kindle parlance.)

Disclosure: I wrote my HarperCollins editor an email this morning that said “How about that Neal Stephenson book!” and didn’t hear back.

Jon Methven is the author of This Is Your Captain Speaking, due out in 2012 by Simon & Schuster. He can be reached here, or follow him on Twitter @jonmethven.

Did you know that more young couples are opting for dogs these days? The TV news says so, so it’s probably true. And rather than choose puppies, they are picking older dogs, who are less active, easier to take care of and (well?) aren’t going to be a burden for that many years. I’m sure it says something about who we are now that the well-off are eschewing the millstone that is parenting in favor of a stint with a pet, but given the damage we do to the children we actually have, this is probably all for the best.

Everyone has been going crazy about “frictionless sharing” for the last week. That’s Facebook’s cute new term for what happens when you give permission for something new and fun to enter your life and then it takes you to a party and “auto-shares” your activity with the world. You drunk slag. What to do? Short version long… you should probably get off the Internet now while the getting is good. (Well? At least consider it!)

• This explanation of the advent of “frictionless sharing” on Facebook led naturally to a conversation about how Facebook cookies work, including when you’re logged out of Facebook. And it was met with a rather strange reaction from a Facebook employee, who wrote: “Generally, unlike other major Internet companies, we have no interest in tracking people. We don’t have an ad network and we don’t sell people’s information.” That’s… absurd; Facebook is both an ad platform and an ad network, and has a pro level Facebook Ads (with, like, salespeople!) system and a self-managing, amateur-level ads system. (Also, you know: Nielsen Facebook ratings exists now?) While many of Facebook’s tracking systems has to do with non-advertising purposes, this is wildly beside the point.

• So now we have delightful products like the Washington Post’s “Social Reader app” (that’s what they call their newspaper on the Facebook. When you read their stories on that, it reports on you reading them to your friends! Isn’t that handy? Auto-broadcasting. Lifestreaming basically! Writes developer Michael Donohoe: “Earlier this year when I was still at the Times we talked to Facebook about a news app. Facebook had a whole set of new features in the pipeline (presumably just launched) and this passive reading action was one of them and they were pushing hard for us to use it.” Heh. But it’s apparently fine for the Washington Post.

• And then there’s the nutso trending in third-party apps. Color and Spotify’s permissions are insane; half the stuff you can interact with via Facebook (and Twitter!) is like “We can add friends and post to your wall and call your mom!”

What can/should you do? Well, you can laboriously keep up with changes in policy and privacy, for starters. It’s boring maintenance, like trimming your nose hair, which you should probably also do soon. This is a good explainer. Spoiler: start here, with your app settings, and delete everything you don’t love. But guess what! This is just the beginning. Just turn on your webcam and rip off your shirt, let’s just get this over with.

“As speeding tickets go it was just one of thousands handed out in the 1930’s as the car took over a once provincial Germany and the autobahns opened the country up to the common man. But the man who received it was no ordinary motorist.” Just guess who he was! GUESS!

A Road-Tripper’s Guide To Some Of The Country’s Oddest, Most Amazing Roads

Growing up, my family went on a lot of car trips. A lot of them. Along with our trusty steed, the maroon minivan, my mom, sister and I journeyed all around the country, from Death Valley to Cape Cod, Yellowstone to Galveston, and as many points as we could hit in between. My interest in geography came, in large part, from my role as a navigator on these trips. Examining road maps and AAA guides, I came to appreciate a good highway. Here are seven roads that I believe are worth building a dream road trip around; some of them I’ve already visited, some are definitely in my future. I don’t know about you, but my favorite kind of road trip includes an excursion off the beaten track for excitement, danger and mayyyybe a covered bridge or two. If I’m lucky.

Like You Need Another Reason Not To Pick Up Hitchhikers: Archer Avenue, Illinois

The Chicago area’s most famous ghost story involves not a mansion or an abandoned asylym but a single stretch of roadway. Dozens of young men have reported picking up an attractive blonde on Archer Ave in Justice, Illinois, and dropping her off at Resurrection Cemetery, where she vanishes once past the gates. I’d be tempted to call it the work of an audacious girl with an amazing sense of humor, but reports of incidents go back as far as 1930s. The name of the ghost is Resurrection Mary, and the story goes that she got into a fight with her boyfriend late one night and stormed out of the dance hall. She was shortly thereafter hit by a car while walking along the road in the dark and died; now she hitches rides to her final resting place just a few miles down the road. Research efforts by local author Ursula Bielski have recently tied the legend to an actual girl, Anna Marija, who was struck by a car on the road in 1927. Spooky.

These Curves Are All Natural: Going-To-The-Sun Road, Montana

You may recognize these two lanes of twisting, scary-cliff-adjacent roadway from the opening of The Shining. That opening captures two aspects of the road that make it so noteworthy: the beauty of its scenery and its impressive lack of guardrails. Named, logically enough, for nearby Going-to-the-Sun Mountain, the roadway can be found on both the National Parks Service’s list of National Historic Landmarks and the American Society of Civil Engineers’ list of National Civil Engineering Landmarks — a dual distinction usually reserved for bridges and lighthouses. Traversing across 50 miles of Glacier National Park’s interior, the road is a case study in daring design and construction, featuring swooping curves, nail-bitingly-scarce shoulders and treacherous elevation climbs and dips, carved into mountainsides. Completed in 1932, it took 11 summers and a budget of just over $2 million to construct. Trip-planning note: save this one for a mid to late summer roadtrip. In June of this year, the road still had drifts 20 feet deep; with so much snow to contend with, plows can sometimes cover only a few hundred feet per day. (During the spring snows, you can track the plows’ progress at the park’s website.)

Hitch Up Your Buggy: Covered Bridge Scenic Byway, Ohio

Do you like covered bridges? Do you really like covered bridges? How do you feel about barns? You are way into neat old barns? Hooo boy, do I have the road for you! Forty-four miles of the best darn covered bridges, rustic barns and charmingly ramshackle fences this side of that calendar in your grandmother’s kitchen. It’s like living stock photography. Following State Route 26, between Marietta and Woodsfield, Ohio, you will drive across eight historic covered bridges, between which you’ll pass a series of barns painted with quilts and Depression-era tobacco pouch ads. Though I’m sure it’s gorgeous year-round, it seems like an ideal trip for autumn leaves viewing. Also, there is a not-too-small chance you will have to stop for livestock in the road.

Best Place To Befriend A Buffalo: I-90, South Dakota

Yes, I’m serious, the section of I-90 that passes through South Dakota is one of America’s greatest roads. A more or less straight line east-west, this particular section of Interstate 90 ranges across expansive farmland, Sioux reservations, the Badlands and Black Hills. Along the way you’ll cross the Missouri River, pass the Buffalo Gap Grasslands (where there are actual buffalo just, like, hanging out), Mount Rushmore and Crazy Horse monuments and come within spitting distance of the exactly-what-you-think-it-is Corn Palace. Most importantly, you will be treated to a truly staggering number of signs directing you to the town of Wall, home of the legendary Wall Drug, the world’s largest drugstore. Make sure you get your free ice water! Also, and I’m speaking from personal knowledge here, there are spots along I-90 where you can totally pull over, get out of your car and feed prairie dogs, buying your “prairie dog food” from one of the manned stands along the highway. Some parts of the landscape are so filled with holes they’re downright whack-a-mole-esque (though way cuter and featuring minimal whacking). I don’t know if they’re legally sanctioned, but I do know that they’re a lot of fun.

You Say “Steve,” I Say “McQueen”: Lombard Street and others, San Francisco

It’s not enough that it has a series of eight hairpin turns on one city block. It’s not enough that it’s paved with relatively uneven bricks. It’s not enough that it has a mandatory (and heavily enforced) five-mph speed limit. No, the famous block of Lombard Street is magnificently steep as well. Drivers navigate an astounding 27-percent gradient from the top of the one-way block to the bottom of Russian Hill. Though it’s the most famous, Lombard isn’t even the steepest street in San Francisco: both 22nd St and nearby Filbert Street claim a 31-percent gradient. And they’re just a straight shot down. Vermont Street, a mere four miles away, has only seven turns, but the turns are much sharper. The neighborhood hosts an annual Bring Your Own Big Wheel event, where hundreds of people race down the hill on, as the name suggests, plastic tricycles. Afterwards, unwanted trikes are donated to the San Francisco Fire Dept’s charity. (And should you want to follow in the tracks of that car-chase scene in Bullitt, an enterprising fan has a map for you here.)

Watch Out For Road Rash: Tail of the Dragon, North Carolina

Tail of the Dragon, located in Deal’s Gap (population: six), is an 11-mile section of US Route 129. Though the scenic overlooks of Calderwood Lake and views of the southern edge of the Great Smoky Mountains are well worth mentioning, it’s this road’s 318 bends that give it a place on our list. The reckless driver in you might be tempted to zip through it — the all-time record is a celeritous eleven minutes — but feel free to chicken out once you take in the Tree of Shame, a large tree adorned with broken motorcycle parts from crashes, a “makeshift shrine dedicated to those bitten by the dragon.” As the sign says, “All Pain & No Gain.” (Indeed, this grisly map marks the locations of the 31 deaths that have occurred on the highway since 2000.) Weaving by such landmarks as Gravity’s Cavity, Crud Corner and Beginner’s End, the serpentine highway is an ideal destination for daredevils, sports car drivers and anyone with really excellent brakes. But be careful of your fellow vehicles on the road: there is a petition out to ban 18-wheeler trucks as the sharp turns mean big rigs occasionally cross into the opposite lane.

Get Your Shining Seas: Overseas Highway, Florida Keys

And finally, the mother of all scenic journeys, the 127 miles of road that link the Florida Keys. Long stretches of this highway were originally a railway, but, after a 1935 hurricane damaged the original tracks beyond repair, the rail company sold what remained of the roadbed and bridges to the state of Florida. This highway is gorgeous, surrounding you on both sides with shimmering sea. Make the hours last longer: along the way, visit the self-proclaimed capital of diving, Key Largo, for lessons and explore some area reefs. Grab lunch at one of the numerous tiny Cuban restaurants in the area. Go to Bahia Honda State Park to gaze at an incredibly well-preserved rail-truss bridge, or stop by Duck Key to pat a dolphin: they’re rubbery! The drive ends in Key West, at which point, since this is the only road into or out of the Keys, you get to do the whole thing over again!

Sponsored posts are editorial content presented by a participating sponsor; advertisers do not produce the content. This post is brought to you by Nissan. MY VERSA ROADTRIP. Start your adventure!

Victoria Johnson is a cartographer and this is her Tumblr.

Photo of Resurrection Cemetery by MrHarman; Hills Bridge photo courtesy of US Forest Service; Wall Drug sign courtesy of Wikipedia; Lombard Street photo by Y6y6y6; Tree of Shame photo by RinzeWind; Overseas Highway photo by Marc Averette.