“Shortly before 6 p.m., near the end of a two-hour debate on the plan, Republicans halted the proceedings, and Democrats claimed that Mr. Boehner was still short of the votes he needed.

At 6:50 p.m., the leaders stopped all business on the floor, where the House had worked through a list of post offices to be renamed, and called a” — Wait, what’s that? Post office renaming? Oh yes. Lots of what our government does is rename post offices, actually! This year alone, “50 bills to rename post offices have been introduced. Three of those bills have made it to the president’s desk, representing a full 13 percent of all legislation signed by President Obama this year.” And back in the 111th Congress (simpler times! Ended in January!), over two years there were 427 bills to rename post offices — but only 70-something of those bills passed. It turns out getting a post office named after you is incredibly challenging! But post office icons beware. Now that they’re closing just under 3700 of them, sometimes the post office you just got named after your dead war hero son is on the list for shuttering.

by Awl Sponsors

This post is brought to you by HP. For more information on HP and HP products visit us at TheNextBench

By Gizmo Gladstone from HP’s TheNextBench

HP’s TouchPad is a tablet that’s capable of a lot — hundreds of apps are already available for the device, and the webOS developer community continues to add more. The potential seems limitless. For instance, imagine using a TouchPad as a game controller for your PC! That’s exactly what we were doing during
Comic Con earlier this month.

This free-to-play game is a futuristic version of Rock ’em Sock ’em Robots. All you’ll need is a TouchPad and a nearby computer set to the World Robot Boxing League (WRB.com) page. For the upcoming film Real Steel, an exclusive promotional app is on the way that lets you use the TouchPad to control the on-screen action of a cybernetic slap-fight happening on your PC.

Let me try and break this down for you. Remember that classic Nintendo game Punch-Out that has you ducking and weaving to take down guys like Bald Bull and Piston Hurricane? 42 Entertainment President Justin Pertschuk says that’s the vibe that they were going for when they designed this single-player game based on the upcoming robotic boxing movie.

The engine powering this gives you a pretty solid experience inside your Web browser, but here’s where it gets cool: You’re picking the punches, ducking and dodging with the TouchPad while the action happens on your PC. As you’re doing the fighting, the tablet’s display also gives you instant feedback on how the fight’s going, tracking fight stats …

You know, let’s skip the tale of the tape and get to the
video of how Real Steel works on the TouchPad.

The Exclusive Real Steel TouchPad app should be available for download in the app store soon.

Gizmo Gladstone is a gamer, a full-blown nerd and Blogger-in-Chief on HP’s gadget blog TheNextBench.com, where he writes about how to get the most out of your tech.

Jim Behrle tweets at @behrle for your possible amusement.

“These objects are difficult to find from Earth, simply because they’re not very big and they’re pretty faint, and they’re close to the Sun as seen from Earth. But we can find them from space, and future satellites will likely find some more. We think that there are others which will be very close to the Earth and have motions that make them relatively easy to reach. So, they could be potential targets to go to with spacecraft.”
 — Astronomer Christian Veillet, who works with the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope, on the discovery of 2010 TK7, a 300-meter-wide asteroid orbiting the sun alongside our planet “like a dog on a leash.” Such asteroids, common around Jupiter, Neptune and Mars, are called “Trojan asteroids.” So while scientists says 2010 TK7 poses no danger to us, and it would be very cool to go to on a spacecraft one day, we should definitely not open up the gates and invite it into our atmosphere.

Ways to win my heart (and traffic): “But that’s not to say that there hasn’t been any innovation in the pizza box space. FAR FROM IT!”

There are many things about this 1995 MTV News clip about “the Internet” that show how much things have changed in a relatively brief period of time, but I think perhaps the most significant is that MTV figured people would sit through at least four minutes of footage about a single topic. God, things were different then. [Via]

They say you mellow as you age. And yet, this is likely the single cattiest dispatch Bob Morris has yet filed for the Times in his many [redacted] years. “Nearby, under a gnarled old tree, a black granite gravestone for one of the host’s dogs had been littered with empty wineglasses. “

“A riveting, powerful performance that forces the viewer to confront his own mortality” — Cahiers du Puppy Videos [Via]

“Especially in its first half, The Bell Jar exposes the situation of a very smart, ambitious young woman coming of age in the 1950s, when intelligence and ambition, past a certain threshold, were real liabilities for women. Plath hospitalizes Esther and lets her out again, but she never resolves the central problem that Esther confronts most palpably in New York: how to be a woman and how to be a writer, and how to be those two things at once. The closest to a solution she gets is her description of the gleeful freedom that becomes available only when Esther totally lets go of her goals and her self-image. In the latter half of the book, Plath holds out the strange promise that there’s a way to kill your compulsive good-girl self without killing your whole self. But she never suggests that there might be some way of doing this that doesn’t involve literally trying to kill yourself.”
 — The Bell Jar at 40.

Cooking the Books is directed by Valerie Temple and shot and edited by Andrew Gauthier. You can see all the Cooking the Books episodes here or even subscribe via iTunes. Previously: Bryan Charles Makes Spicy Chicken; Sigrid Nunez Makes Szechuan Green Beans; Emma Rathbone Makes Strawberry Wafer Cookies; Doogie Horner Makes “Gettin’ Laid Lemonade”; Tao Lin Makes Raw Salad; Jennifer Egan Makes Macaroons.