Well, the Big News/Talk War lasted barely longer than the war in Iraq: not only did KOMA, the new kid on the news block, fail to dislodge the dominant KTOK, but KTOK actually picked up almost two share points, finishing at the top of the ratings for the first time in ages. (KOMA doesn't even have two share points yet.)

It wasn't all sweetness and light for KTOK owner Clear Channel, though: their country stations are floundering and their CHR outlet isn't doing well enough to be floundering. Still, you take your points where you can, and CC's sort-of-alternative station is doing surprisingly well.

Over at rival Citadel, there's little to cheer about, what with the KATT still in the doldrums and the hotly-hyped Bull coming across like underdone veal. I give it a month before the plug is pulled and another format is slapped on the frequency. And speaking of slap, someone ought to slap Citadel's audio people, if they have any; their stations don't even sound good on crappy radios, let alone on the high-fidelity stuff. I can forgive this on The Spy, which broadcasts with 3 watts from somewhere out in Utah or something, but there's no excuse for the big boys.

Meanwhile, Renda, whose FMs are all doing decently — classic-rock KRXO dropped a notch but is still #2 — must be wondering about what it's done to KOMA, and what it's going to take to make some headway in the AM talk circus against a seemingly-revitalized KTOK and whatever the hell Citadel is doing with WKY. At the very least, it's going to take a fair amount of time: news/talk listeners, as a group, tend to be fairly loyal to their chosen stations, and KTOK has a huge head start. Add to this the fact that Clear Channel controls many of the top syndicated talk shows and is loath to give them up to a crosstown rival — I suspect the reason CC bumped the daytime Spanish-language programming on tiny KEBC and replaced it with talk was to reduce the number of programs available to KOMA — and I see a long, hard road ahead.

Meanwhile, Tyler, the only sort-of-local cluster, still hasn't announced plans for that move-in from Tishomingo, but waiting for the other shoe to drop is second nature in Oklahoma City radio.

This morning's nightmare took place in a universe very much like this one, except that American Motors wound up merging with Subaru rather than with Chrysler.

Everyone I know has swum across the river to The Island, where the national anthem, were they jingoistic enough to have a national anthem, would be "Don't Worry, Be Happy". And I'm not a particularly good swimmer, but I figure I can make it, and the few possessions I have (clothing, identification, MasterCard) I've sealed into a waterproof bag which I will schlep along with me.

I wash up on the shore, and I'm informed that I have violated the Social Contract by carrying all this stuff. It is duly impounded, and I will remain in the reception center for a minimum of twenty-four hours or until I sign a confession, whichever is longer. In the meantime, I will be put on display as a Bad Example, a warning to others who might be guilty of this particularly-heinous form of ungoodthink.

I don't know what brought this on; I'm guessing it must have something to do with May Day.

The William Morris Agency, which represents a broad spectrum of entertainment-industry types, also employs a battery of lawyers, and they turned those lawyers loose on the Boycott Hollywood site, demanding it be shut down and the domain terminated. The registrar (Dotster's NamesDirect, may they rot in purgatory) capitulated; for the last day or two, the letter from WMA will be posted on the site.

The Professor calls this one exactly what it is:

I moved to Los Angeles in 1988, hoping to work for some of these people. This is, I think, the first time I'm glad I failed.

As of last night (two deleted, one added), I have twenty-three spam filters working on my incoming mail; their success ratio is somewhere between not much and zilch, but any spam I don't have to look at counts as a very minor moral victory.

The email provider for this domain recently installed a server-level despamming system called Vipul's Razor, which is supposed to catch the varmints before they reach my POP3 box. I set it up last night for my primary mailbox, and it caught fifteen of twenty-seven before I was able to provide it any feedback. Not too bad. Better, there were no false positives: nothing I actually wanted was misidentified as spam.

I'll leave this in place for a while and see if it's sufficient, or if I need to go to a more activist, locally-based system like MailFrontier's Matador.

No, it's not the sequel to Moby's 1000-beats-per-minute "Thousand"; it's the approximate sales volume at Apple's Music Store, which moved some 275,000 tracks in its first 18 hours of operation.

The Register notes that two labels have signed up for the eventual Windows version of the Apple store, and wonders about it:

As would I. Is there some reason — other than sheer volume — why the music industry should fear Windows users more than they fear Macintosh users?

I am, and always have been, partial to anonymous donations, but in view of the fact that recipient (and Major Babe) Susanna Cornett has openly declared me "ever generous in word and deed", let the following be stipulated:

This contribution was hard money. Plastic, yes, but still hard. As such, it's subject to disclosure, though the remaining provisions of McCain-Feingold don't seem to apply.

Baseball Crank associate The Mad Hibernian has, shall we say, mixed emotions regarding Nurse Bloomberg's antismoking decree. On the plus side:

There are, however, consequences:

Advantage: smokers. Which is worse: a bar that smells like Camels, or a bar that smells like camels?

If you're selling a house in Oklahoma, you have to fill out a fairly-detailed disclosure form [link requires Adobe Acrobat Reader] which is supposed to reveal everything from non-functional appliances to radon gas.

One of the environmental questions seems uniquely Oklahoman: "Are you aware of existence of hazardous or regulated materials and other conditions having an environmental impact, including, but not limited to, residue from drug manufacturing?"

Not specific enough? Under a new bill, passed without opposition by the Legislature and allowed to become law without the Governor's signature, the next version of the disclosure form will be required to state whether the property has been used as a meth lab.

Next year, I expect a measure which, when I trade in my car, will require me to attest to the highest speed at which at it has been driven (101 mph) and the number of people shot by the driver or by passengers therein (none).

With the wrath of the mighty Entertainment Industry arrayed against it, you'd think that Boycott Hollywood might have quietly disappeared into the night by now.

It hasn't happened. As Lisa S. notes:

Meanwhile, back at the agency, it might have gone something like this:

"You sicced the lawyers on them?"

"Absolutely. It's what we pay them for."

"You freaking feeb! Don't you realize that every goddamn blog from here to Latvia is gonna rake our asses over the coals for this? And if the blogs are doing it, sooner or later the real media are gonna jump us."

"We can take it."

"Like hell we can. It's gonna read like this: 'The William Morris Agency, which represents entertainment giants like —' and that's it, because everyone they list as a client is gonna fire us and go sign with someone else who isn't in the newspaper."

"We'll sue."

"Get over it. We're toast. Jim Wiatt is gonna come downstairs, and he's gonna say, 'The William Morris Agency has a solid, unblemished reputation going back over a hundred years. And we're going to keep it that way.' And next week you and I will be working at goddamn Fatburger."

Hollywood: home of the happy ending. We hope.

Someone wandered in here last night searching for the area code for 867-5309, proving that even putative one-hit wonders like Tommy Tutone (who actually charted three records) last forever.

In fact, I think 867-5309 may ultimately supplant those "555" numbers in TV and movies that don't fool anyone. Check out this T-Mobile Roaming FAQ item (scroll to the bottom of item #8), or Call Forwarding on this GSM Features page.

Not today.

Four years ago on this date — well, then we had some serious stormage. It passed fairly close to me, but the only damage I suffered was from high-speed hail.

This being before I started the daily blog, I reported thusly in a subsequent Vent:

DavidMSC, who used to live here, seems to be almost nostalgic about it. Well, of course; he wasn't here when it happened. Still, storms, especially really big storms, have their devotees, and I can't deny the fascination; as the pundits say, there's a high level of shock and awe.

As everyone now knows, Funny Cide is the first gelding to win the Kentucky Derby in over seventy years.

You can't tell me that at least some of the two or three dozen Democrats running for President in 2004 don't find this auspicious, even heartening; the Democrats haven't sent a gelding to the White House since [insert date here].

The great stone face of the Old Man on the Mountain has always been the defining symbol of New Hampshire; his not-quite-smile, not-quite-scowl has always seemed to be the ultimate expression of "Been there, seen that."

And yes, the experts say that the collapse of the Old Man was inevitable, that wind and weather and time and trouble would bring down that great stone face — any time you've got this much rock exposed, you've massively increased the risk factors — but still it seems impossible; you no more expect this than you expect Lady Liberty to shorten her skirts and do the Hokey Pokey.

This has not been a great year for New Hampshire, with the fire on Mount Washington back in February and now the Old Man crumbled into dust, but you don't spend four hundred years in New England without acquiring some sort of resilience. And I hope they don't decide to redesign the state highway signs, small reminders of the Old Man at his finest and craggiest.

"Intellectuals," says Cinderella Bloggerfeller, "are simply human beings who should be judged by the same standards as ordinary people." Certainly they're no less capable of blithering idiocy than the rest of us, a point made in La connaissance inutile (English title: The Flight from Truth) by Jean-François Revel (translation by Mr Bloggerfeller):

Which is why I'm not too perturbed that, for instance, national scold William Bennett plays the slots; it may seem inconsistent with Bennett's incessant grousing about the lack of virtue displayed by some of us, but for most of the human race, achieving a level of perfect consistency usually occurs at the moment of death, at which point it really doesn't matter anymore.

I found this at a friend's LiveJournal; LJ eschews such things as permalinks, so if you want to read the whole thing, you need to scroll to 27 April, 7:26 pm. Before you ask: no, it's not about me.

There's a noble (as distinguished from Nobel) prize for the person who does make this discovery.

I'm inclined to believe I'm not the only person on earth who maintains a direct correlation: one box of checks, one check register. And this isn't as easy as it used to be, either. While the number of bills hasn't decreased (ha!), I'm paying a lot of the recurring bills via my bank's online facility, which means that I might write maybe six, seven checks a month instead of 20 or 25, which in turn means that with all those online transactions, ATM withdrawals, Visa Check Card purchases and whatnot to log in, the old-style register, designed for a box of 200 checks, just isn't sufficient anymore.

How is the world's largest check printer dealing with this? They've added a few pages to the register — and started packing 150 checks to the box.

"Did the price go down?" What are you, nuts?

Cam Edwards, the morning man at KTOK (and one of our regular readers here), interviewed Lisa S. of Boycott Hollywood this morning.

Lisa was happy to announce that traffic has picked up considerably since the legal action to shut her down — 2.6 million visitors since Thursday morning — and that their move to a new registrar (and a new host) will open up multiple domains which presumably will point to the main site.

Further developments as they happen.

But without Timothy McVeigh, who was executed for his part in the Oklahoma City bombing.

Terry Nichols, whose part was judged to be less substantial, was convicted, not on murder charges, but on federal conspiracy and manslaughter charges, and is serving a prison term. The state has chosen to try him on murder charges, naming 160 victims who were not listed in the federal indictment, lest he manage to appeal his federal convictions successfully.

A preliminary hearing for Nichols was convened today to see if there is sufficient evidence to hold this trial; how long it will continue is anybody's guess.

The Man from F.U.N.K.L.E. has an idea what's going through Tim Robbins' head right about now:

Anyone up to marching for SARS? (No, Sars, not you.)

The magazine formerly known as Movieline, which is now passing itself off as Movieline's Hollywood Life, has gone to a larger-sized page format and has restarted its internal counter at Volume I, Number 1, but the really weird change is in the publishing schedule, which now reads like this:

By comparison, here is the same sort of passage from Mad, Volume I, Number 334 — founder William M. Gaines once said, "We'll never have a Volume 2," and he meant it — March/April 1995:

Before Gaines' death, they made no claim to "bi-monthly" anything; Number 105, September 1966, says this:

All this neatly obscures the fact that Mad actually came out on a regular schedule: every forty-five days. And the dates were chosen, reported Frank Jacobs in his biography of Gaines, to insure that no issue was ever actually on sale at newsstands during the month printed on its cover.

Of course, Gaines is gone, Mad is now taking ads and is coming out on a regular monthly cycle, but I've gotta wonder: Has Anne Volokh of MHL been influenced by The Usual Gang of Idiots?

Diane L. reports on yet another effort to insulate our innocent youth:

Jet? I thought she was a little lady suffragette.

Can you imagine what these people might think about Oklahoma's Midwest City Bombers?

Wal-Mart, in one of its periodic spates of piety, has barred the lad mags Stuff, Maxim and FHM from its magazine racks.

The only real surprise here, for me anyway, was "Wal-Mart carried FHM?" I mean, it's not like the place is overrun with copies of The Weekly Standard.

Kevin Aylward explains the popularity of P2P file sharing in terms even a record executive can understand:

Still, sharing of copyrighted files is illegal, and the music industry has been making noises about hacking into people's computers, a maneuver worthy of the Mafia — except, of course, that the Mob would never telegraph its blows in this manner. Aylward approaches this from another angle: what if we allow them to check our computers for illicit files, in exchange for a piece of the action?

Seriously. Here's his example:

I'm not entirely sure this would work, but I have to admit I like the idea of the RIAA paying, um, protection money.

I just can't take any more of Oliver Beene.

I mean, I'm sure there's a place for a TV series that combines the worst of Malcolm in the Middle and The Wonder Years, and most assuredly that place is Fox, but geez, this thing is strained, and not just because half the stars are named Grant.

The last straw was this week, when one scene called for worse disarray than usual on the floor, what with Oliver being dragged across it and all, and just above the center of the shot was a lovely Atlantic 45-rpm record.

With a farging bar code on the right side of the label.

Yes, I know period pieces are prone to anachronism — I could swear I saw Paul Pfeiffer in Wonder Years doing the infamous Marv Albert Yes! — but dammit, there are some things even I won't forgive. Not even the presence of implausible hottie Wendy Makkena, last seen (by me, anyway) in Sister Act as the wimpiest nun ever to wear the wimple, can save this show.

(Dear Vickie: Is this obscure enough for you?)

Greg Hlatky relates an only-in-New Jersey sort of event:

Migod, I think I've actually stayed at that inn.

I've had fairly kind words for the Garden State during the week or so I've actually been there. Then again, I live in Oklahoma, which sometimes seems to run neck and neck with New Jersey as Official National Laughingstock, and I suppose this could affect my judgment in some way. But even allowing for this factor, I don't think I could come up with something quite like this (Hlatky again):

I live three miles from a former EPA Superfund site, so this impresses me perhaps less than it could.

Still, New Jersey was where I met Susanna Cornett, and New Jersey was the site of my first face-to-face meeting with the ineffable She Who Is Not To Be Named. ("Eff that," she said.) And no, neither one of them is actually from New Jersey, but what else can I do? Try to say something nice about Frank Lautenberg?

And if you're still in a good mood, go read this denunciation of the Ed Biz by Cam Edwards.

The money quote:

Is the NEA technically a union? Teachers in the Oklahoma City district are represented by AFT for collective bargaining. The NEA, as I understand it, fancies itself more of a "professional association," along the lines of the AMA. Still, its influence is considerable, and not always salutary.

Update, 11:45 am: See Comments. The NEA may not be the union around here, but it's clearly somebody's union. (Thanks, Cam.)

From the weekly newsletter Reason Express:

Who knew there were more?

Dr. Bud E. Bryan, Road Kill columnist for autoextremist.com, offers this reminder:

I can hardly wait.

The ever-cheeky Page bills this as "Best. Headline. Ever." And, well, it is not advisable to disagree with Page, especially when she's right.

This week's Carnival of the Vanities is hosted by Common Sense & Wonder, and it's brought to you with an image map that demonstrates far more of the latter than the former.

But what the hell. It's something new, and it's something creative, and it deserves somewhere between 2.2 and 2.7 cheers for breathing some new life into an old (33 weeks, by blog standards, is almost antediluvian) format. And they did provide a text link, for the benefit of old farts, the mouseover-challenged, and Lynx users.

A couple of months ago, I reported on the Big Elm Tree out front, which seemed to be in dire condition:

There has been very little rain since then — we're running at about 50 percent of normal so far this year — but the tree seems to be flourishing. About ten, maybe fifteen percent of its branches are still bare and will probably remain so, but for the most part, it's green and growing, however weirdly-shaped and asymmetrical it's become.

Living out here on the Lone Prairie evidently builds up one's stamina.

Andrea Harris sees the Great Political Divide, not between the left and the right, or between the liberal and the conservative, but between the ideological and the practical.

I think. This is what she said:

W. really isn't what you'd call non-ideological, but he's clearly more interested in ends than in means, and if that means that ideology has to take a back seat for the time being, so be it. No wonder there's so much background rumbling amid the Republican base. And the left continues to be upset with W.'s general unwillingness to take its advice. Given the quality of that advice in recent years, it's hard to blame him for blowing them off.

The new URL is boycott-hollywood.net, and is expected to go live some time next week. (Allow the usual delays for DNS propagation.)

In case you're just coming up to speed on this matter, here's the last paragraph of the site's mission statement:

I might add that the opinions of said Celebrity Pundits might carry more weight if there was something to back them up besides "Well, I just feel that way." Too often, there isn't.

Today at Terry Nichols' preliminary hearing, his wife Marife testified that Nichols had sold fertilizer at gun shows under the name "Ground Zero Impact."

How long before, say, The New York Times demands background checks for fertilizer buyers?

I've been to the west side of Moore, and there's nothing there that screams to the heavens "Yo! Tornado! Over here!"  For some reason, though, it's the preferred point of touchdown for the nastiest storms on record.

This wasn't an F5 or anything, but F2 was definitely within the realm of plausibility; this particular funnel danced east-by-northeast across the south side of the Oklahoma City metro, taking out much of a bank building on I-240 and smashing roof and window panels at General Motors' assembly plant.

No damage chez Chaz, and this time I had enough sense to stay inside.

(Update, 9 May, 8:30 am: The Weather Guys have started classifying this storm as an F3.)

Last night, KWTV worked up a creepy-looking map of the storm path, and superimposed upon it the path of the 1999 F5 storm. And what's most telling is that those paths were almost perfectly parallel for a good six, seven miles before crossing, the Storm of the Century veering northward (towards me) while last night's funnels kept to a more easterly route.

I suspect at least some of the people who rebuilt after 1999 are thinking now that they've had just about enough of this.

First they were the Redmen, and that was fine for a while, but by 1972 the forces of political correctness had grown sufficiently strong, or at least loud, to demand a change.

So they became the Minutemen, a name with even more history behind it, and one that wasn't likely to incur the wrath of the Defenders of Ethnicity. (Did you ever notice that actual members of these allegedly-aggrieved ethnic groups complain a lot less than their self-appointed spokespersons?)

Now the University of Massachusetts is changing the name of its athletic teams again, this time to the Gray Wolves. There didn't seem to be any organized objection to the Minuteman — UMass women's teams, competing as "Minutewomen" (!), didn't raise any particular fuss — but the poor old colonial fellow was, after all, a representative of only a single gender, and what's worse, he toted a musket. God forbid anyone should be seen with a gun these days.

Are gray wolves indigenous to Massachusetts? Springfield Republican outdoor writer Frank Sousa has the numbers:

And you just know those weasels from PETA are going to jump all over this.

(Update, 10:30 am: Cam Edwards offers an alternative: "I suggest replacing the name Minutemen with Nancyboys. That's mixed-gender, and it certainly reflects the moral fortitude of the current student population when compared with the original Minutemen." Ow!)

The touch-screen voting machine is coolly high-tech, but it invites suspicion — how do you double-check a bunch of electrons?

Election Systems & Software is beta-testing a touch-screen machine that produces a paper ballot for each vote; they hope to have the device ready to ship this summer.

Well, okay. I still like Oklahoma's paper-ballot/electronic-reader system, which strikes me as both pretty efficient and highly verifiable, but I'd like to see this new contraption up close.

The city of Dallas owns a prime piece of FM broadcast spectrum in north Texas: WRR-FM 101.1, currently broadcasting classical music at 100,000 watts.

How prime is it? Other broadcasters would like to get their hands on it. The city isn't considering selling WRR outright, but the possibility of a move down the dial has presented itself.

A number of proposals have been entertained, but apparently the one most likely to get past the city council is one by Susquehanna Radio, which wants to move its KDBN-FM, currently at 93.3, to 101.1, and fill 93.3 with KRNB-FM from 105.7. The city would receive the 105.7 facility, which runs 93,000 watts from a stick in Wise County, and $60 million.

Downside? Wise County is a long way away — the tower is almost 50 miles northwest of Fort Worth — and even 93 kw will barely reach into the south side of Dallas, to say nothing of the southern suburbs. Since the station is owned by the city, opponents contend, at the very least it should be able to reach the entire city without noise or interference.

The historical record shows many instances where a classical station relocated to an inferior facility in exchange for lots of money; the best-known, perhaps, was the move of Cleveland's WCLV to a 6-kw channel in exurban Lorain. It was argued at the time that the move would help secure the station's then-uncertain future, and maybe it did, but I'd hate to have to try to tune them in from the parking lot at Severance Hall.

I just hate it when it imitates mine.

Yes, yes, of course there are more tornado reports, but this time there was a tinge of irony to the story: the storm tracked across the northeast-side area where the major television stations are located, and managed briefly to knock two of them off the air. National Weather Service radio booted its automated voice off the air in favor of live coverage; it was no less useful than the TV reports, and frankly, how much murky, indistinct video can one person be expected to watch?

The good thing, of course, is that despite two nights of this (and a slight chance of a third), no one was killed, and relatively few were injured, by the effects of the storms.

Kevin McGehee has been pondering that left-wing mantra, "Bush Is Hitler", and its inexplicable appeal to people who really should know better.

In an effort to find hidden nuance, I shifted into Heavy Anagram Mode, and came up with the following:

RUSH IS BLITHE — well, we knew that.

HUSH I BRISTLE — Rumsfeld's job, or maybe Frank J.'s.

THRUSH IS BILE — presumably a reference to Maureen Dowd.

HIS LUSH TRIBE — of course, the twins.

HIS BLUE SHIRT — for use in Blue states, I assume.

THE BLUISH IRS — well, they certainly make me blue.

LET HIS HUBRIS — a long way away, I think.

SHRUB IS LITHE — he's practically a gymnast, compared to some of the pols.

IS SLITHER HUB — paid for by Venomous Kate.

RELISH HIS BTU — Iraqi oil production must be making a comeback.

All kinds of possibilities here. It's a shame most of them will be overlooked.

A trip to Deepest Ephemera, courtesy of Lynn Sislo:

Actually, that bit was designed to elicit a different response altogether: to hook together the following three thoughts:

"I really love music."
"They must have gone to a lot of trouble to find this story."
"I must go renew my membership at once."

If it seems that there's a disproportionate number of reports like this during the semiannual fundraisers, well, now you know why.

I'm not saying I've never set foot in a sports bar, but were I to make a list of my Favorite Places in All the World, sports bars would probably not rank highly. Apart from the atmosphere, which is usually no more breathable than vichyssoise, there is this built-in cognitive-dissonance generator, as explained on Play One on TV:

I won't even speculate as to which of those groups would be more likely to include me.

According to Entertainment Weekly (issue #710, 16 May), Rebecca "Mystique" Romijn-Stamos says that if she really could shape-shift, she'd like to become a guy — "just to see what it's like to pee standing up."

Yeah, that'll get my ten bucks for X3.

General Tommy Franks has announced flatly: "The Iraqi Baath Socialist Party is dissolved." It's more a formality than anything else — most Baath leaders have fled or are in, um, "stable condition" — but it opened the door for Franks' next statement, which calls for the surrender of Baath Party or other Iraqi goverment documents to the coalition government.

One step at a time, as they say.

The ever-electric Joni, with the Scorn-O-Meter turned up past Withering:

If it's any consolation, I got to this level of idiocy with mere text editors.

Something I posted at the end of January:

Pretty much the entire dating cycle is beyond my comprehension, so I am always interested in other people's methods, especially when they're less unsuccessful than mine.

On the other hand, this technique of Dawn Olsen's seems awfully familiar somehow:

Now comes this from Donna:

When even the Major Babes feel like they're getting nowhere, those of us on the fringes of date-ability must surely be doomed.

The Democratic National Committee has actually put up something they call a Supreme Court Countdown, with the ominous warning: "Act Now! America's Values at Risk With Supreme Court Vacancy"!

Um, last I looked, there wasn't a Supreme Court vacancy. Did David Souter get run over by a truck last night or something?

John Rosenberg explains this phenomenon:

The nerve of that guy Bush, actually following the procedures in the Constitution. Sheesh.

The erstwhile Mrs Willis isn't entirely devoid of appeal, I suppose, but I tend to fall on the "not" side of this question, inasmuch as I have a near-allergic reaction to some plastics.

The former manager of her Idaho ranch wasn't interested, either, and he claims she fired him for his lack of interest.

Donna? Dawn? Anyone? Does this seem plausible to you?

(Muchas gracias: Phillip Coons, who so far has kept discreetly silent.)

Actually, I don't know anybody by that name, but it gives me an opportunity to plug a T-shirt that is, shall we say, somewhat critical of the Mayor of the City of New York, and which incidentally can be had at The Store at NewYorkish.com.

(Via suck-my-big.org)

Two Romanian astronomers have announced that by reviewing astronomical data and Scriptural reportage, they have determined the dates and times of the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus Christ.

Liviu Mircea and Tiberiu Oproiu, from the Astronomic Observatory Institute in Cluj, Romania, say Christ died at 3:00 pm (presumably local time) on Friday, 3 April, 33 AD, and rose again at 4:00 am on Sunday, 5 April. I'm guessing this was under the Julian calendar, proclaimed seventy-odd years earlier and still more or less in sync with the seasons.

The Gospels specify the resurrection to have taken place on the first day of the week and shortly after Passover, which is the first full moon after the vernal equinox. And in the spring of 33, there was a solar eclipse visible from the Middle East, which would account for the incredible darkness of that weekend.

(Muchas gracias: Jesus Gil.)

I don't know if Robert Burrows' The Great American Parade is truly, as WaPo critic Gene Weingarten says, "the worst novel ever published in the English language," but having grown up on both Bulwer-Lytton and Jackie Collins, I simply have to check this out for myself.

Personally, I'd rather have a real live dead-tree book — I am, after all, a creature of habit — but the online publisher Lulu now has TGAP in e-book and printed-on-demand formats, so it appears I'll get my chance. The hard part, of course, will be finding the time to read the darn thing.

Stephen Joseph, identified in this piece as a public interest lawyer — not even a hint of scare quotes — has filed suit in Marin County Superior Court against Kraft Foods' Nabisco unit, claiming that its use of trans fats in Oreo makes them dangerous. The suit asks that Nabisco be barred from selling Oreos to California children.

Suggestion for tort reform: Should Mr Joseph lose this suit, he should be force-fed Crisco. Intravenously.

(Via Tongue Tied)

Lesley at Plum Crazy seemed awfully impressed with the Buck Floomberg item from this weekend, and frankly I was puzzled by her reaction, until I read this, addressed to Hizzoner Hizself:

Migod, I do believe the woman is serious. No one moves to New Jersey without a damned good reason.

I have complained before about the mixed signals in current Chrysler advertising, and, well, I'm about to do it again.

To plug stuff like the Pacifica (don't call it a wagon, and for gosh sakes, don't call it a minivan) "sports touring vehicle", the Auburn Hills boys have adopted one of those artsy black-and-white campaigns, which is fine with me, and for one page, which is captioned simply STYLE, they've photographed an utterly lovely right foot in a strappy sandal, which is even finer with me.

Until you look past her perfect pedicure and notice that she's got her foot on the brake.

And another pleasant daydream goes sixty to zero in seconds, um, flat.

The Recording Industry Association of America sends out little bots to crawl around Web space and look for copyrighted music files, and should any be found, the lawyers grind out the boilerplate.

They ground out some of it to the Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics at the Pennsylvania State University, which puzzled department officials, inasmuch as there weren't any such files on their servers. Eventually they found what the bot had: a filkish tune about a gamma-ray satellite, written by Dr Peter Usher, which the bot had misidentified as a song by R&B yawner Usher.

The RIAA noted in its apology to Penn State that it does not require its enforcers to audition files called into question. Similarly, you'd hardly expect Stalin to keep track of every single kulak.

Bleeding Brain (if permalinks are Blogspotty, go to 12 May) has a thoughtful essay on a question that has occasionally occurred to me as well:

Given the general unpleasantness that prevailed under the Tsars, it's probably no wonder that this new movement seemed appealing, or at least no worse. And BB admits that the official abolition of classes (never mind how well it worked in actual practice, which is not at all) might have scored points with him. But then there's this:

People who didn't have anything probably didn't see anything wrong with this; if anything, they might have seen it as a leveling of the playing field. But for property owners, and children of property owners, this could have been — perhaps should have been — a red flag.

It's a good piece, and even if we fear that our 1906 selves might have been complicit in this revolution, at least our 2003 selves know better.

I thought I was picky, but get a whiff of this:

These days, someone who doesn't have allergies might well be described as unnaturally healthy.

(West L.A. or Manhattan Beach? Marina del Rey is out?)

Six foot three? In flats?

Then again, that would almost certainly guarantee long legs.

I'd say this guy has narrowed the field more than he can possibly imagine — and I've quoted less than half his laundry list. (Besides, if I brought this up, all of you would bust out laughing.)

The lovely Weetabix probably won't be satisfied with half a Kit Kat:

(Mental note: What possessed me to buy these damned inside-out Oreos?)

Terry Nichols, convicted in federal court of conspiracy and eight counts of manslaughter in the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, will now face a minimum of 160 first-degree murder charges in a state court.

No date has been set; Nichols has been serving a life term in Club Fed.

The major reason for redesigning American paper currency, we are assured, is to make counterfeiting more difficult.

Needless to say, the Bureau of Engraving and Printing is not about to identify all the little technological tricks that go into the new bills, but Cam Edwards thinks he's found the secret ingredient.

So far, this morning has been notable mostly for a string of minor surprises.

I turned in early last night, so I had no idea how badly the 0.4-cent county sales tax proposal was being beaten. On the way outside, I noted that however much rain fell amid the endless rumblings last night, it still wasn't enough to get the dirt off my car. And the bottom half of my doorknob was covered with some dark, gunky substance, like a partially-chewed Tar-Bar™ (money back if you get a stone).

Oh, and more rain is on the way some time in the next half hour. Let's see how it rearranges the dirt.

Ho-hum. Another day, another blogger bashing Laurence Simon. Not that Mr Simon gives a flying fish, particularly, but I am constantly amazed at the amount of vitriolic vapor farted in his general direction. I mean, it's not like he's hiding out in Oklahoma to duck a quorum call or anything.

(Disclosure: I receive no traffic from ATS and expect no changes as a result of this posting.)

Steven Chapman reports that it is now against the law to insult the French national anthem; uttering an audible "boo" during the Marseillaise will now cost you 7500 euros and/or six months in le pokey.

In France, anyway. If you do it in Oklahoma, the half-dozen people who actually recognize the tune will probably break into a cheer.

For the thirty-fourth consecutive week without a reported fatality, the Carnival of the Vanities continues apace, this time hosted by The Inscrutable American. If you're new to blogging and want to see a sampling of the best, or if you've done this for ages and want to see where all your traffic went, this is your first stop.

After the dispiriting experience described in "No experience required", I was ready for some good news, and needless to say, I didn't get it.

There exists something called the Soulmate Calculator, which will "calculate the number of American singles you must meet to find your soulmate." This being a Microsoft Active Server Page, I figured it probably would fail on dividing by transfinites, but I went ahead and plugged in some data anyway. Since I have a marked tendency to fall for women who are geographically unacceptable, I chose to limit the pickings to this general area; otherwise, I tried to be as unpicky as I could without making a mockery of it all, specifying a height range of four foot nine to six foot one (this would eliminate the lovely and talented Jane Galt, but she doesn't live around here anyway), ages 33 to 55, no preference on ethnicity or relationship status, and indicating a preference for some form of Christianity, on the dubious basis that leaving it blank would not expand the local field substantially.

There are fourteen characteristics which may be specified in percentile terms; on only three (emotional intelligence, compassion and humor) did I request higher than the median.

And after the server digested all this, it tossed out the following statistics:

• My probability coefficient is 0.0080751 and a bunch more digits; I will need to meet 1,238 women to find The One.
  
• I might have to move.

Gee, thanks.

Fortunately, I'm quite accustomed to desperation, or I might be tempted by something like this.

Twice within fifteen minutes this morning, the NOAA weather radio regaled us with an explanation of tonight's lunar eclipse, why it happens, and when to see it.

The rest of that quarter-hour was devoted to the forecast, which made it quite clear that skies will be overcast for the next two days, with increasing chances of thunderstorms, and that our chances of actually seeing the eclipse were on par with those of a mascot at Satan's School for Snowballs.

I hate when they do that.

Stephen Joseph, last seen suing Kraft Foods over the hazards of Nabisco's Oreo cookies, has announced that he's dropping the suit: "At the time the lawsuit was filed nobody knew about trans fat," he said. "Now everybody knows about trans fat."

Were I a legal beagle at Kraft, I think I'd like to make sure that everybody knows about frivolous lawsuits, too.

(Muchas gracias: Cam Edwards.)

Boycotts, as the phrase goes, are as American as apple pie, though it strains the term to stretch it far enough to the fifty-odd Texas Democratic legislators playing hooky on Lake Texoma so as to stall a redistricting vote pushed by state Republicans.

Yes, I'm enough of a child of the Sixties to appreciate a conscientious refusal to take part in something big and institutional and possibly damaging.

But dammit, these guys are getting paid to take part in something big and institutional and possibly damaging. At the very least, they ought to be docked for their absences, and if Texas House rules permit, they should be disciplined. I have no problem with following one's conscience, but sometimes there's a price tag attached.

John Rosenberg was canny enough to end a posting with this sentence:

A commenter astutely riposted, "That, sir, is the sort of errant pedantry up with which I will not put."

Now I said all that to say all this: Once upon a time, Games magazine, taking note of the "prepositions are inappropriate words to end sentences with" rule, held a competition to see if anyone could stack two, even three of the pesky little words at the end of a sentence.

Certain liberties were taken with the definition of "preposition", I think — some of these look suspiciously adverbial to me — but the winner managed a string of five. It requires some setup, of course.

Child sleeps upstairs; family library is downstairs. Parental unit brings up a storybook; child rejects it, complaining, "What did you bring that book I didn't want to be read to out of up for?"

This is, I believe, up there with the old saw about how two negatives make a positive, but two positives will never make a negative.

Yeah, right.

So why would eBay, which knows me perfectly well, from my user ID to my 123 positive feedback points — not too shabby for someone who's never sold anything — need to know my password?

Which is by way of introducing you to today's spam, which was a lame attempt to steal said password, titled "Security Check." (yes, with the period), and swiping eBay graphics in an attempt to look legit. Had I filled in the blanks as requested, this information would have been posted to a page at a domain called memenutza.com, ostensibly owned by one Michael Rafter of Denver.

I have, of course, notified eBay; I'm passing this on to the rest of you in case the culprit has a fistful of blogger names.

In previous episodes, I've made fun of a California lawyer's war on Oreos. I still think he's a twit, and I still think legal action is ill-advised if not actually insane, but I'm not about to argue that trans fats are actually good for you.

Diane L. goes a little farther. She characterizes them as a "health menace", and expounds:

And why is that, you ask?

Well, not just because. I'd scorn the Oreo (although frankly, I prefer the late, lamented Hydrox, but that's another religious battle entirely) if it tasted like the hockey pucks it vaguely resembles; if I really wanted a mouthful of such, I'd stock up on rice cakes, which in civilized societies are used to hold up the wobbly fourth leg of the coffee table.

Diane does have a solution of sorts:

Sounds reasonable enough to me. (If, as usual, Blogspot archives are harder to trace than Iraqi artifacts, dial up 12 May and take the 12:01 am posting.)

Actually, today's tornadoes seem to have missed me (again!), but apparently this crap is going to keep going for most of the night, so output from this outpost may be annoyingly sporadic for a while.

(Who was that who said it wasn't sporadic enough? Fie upon thee, and thy doggy little mange, too.)

The next voice you hear belongs to Lisa S. of Boycott Hollywood:

And, inasmuch as I happen to have a small soapbox to scream from:
Free Cam!

(Limit one Free Cam with regular purchase at participating locations. Tax not included.)

Nearly two dozen containers of imported fireworks for pyrotechnic displays are sitting at West Coast ports for lack of inland transportation; the Washington Times reports that new security rules for hauling explosives, enacted this past February, have made the nation's railroads unwilling to mess with the stuff without some assurances from DOT that they won't be held liable if, for instance, they miss one background check somewhere along the way.

Photon Courier (16 May) points out that eventually, these containers will likely be moved by truck, which will enhance neither the national economy nor national security:

We'll still be able to buy sparklers and bottle rockets, I presume, but the big displays on the Glorious Fourth could be jeopardized.

Starting the first of July, anyone applying for a driver's license in Oklahoma will be required to submit a finger scan (not as messy as a set of prints) to the Department of Public Safety. Governor Henry signed the enabling legislation yesterday, which specifies that a court order is required for anyone outside the DPS to get access to the scanned data.

The July start date means that I'll be one of the first to get this treatment (unless I get a sudden burst of anticrastination and get my license renewed before then); what I really want to know is if the independent tag agencies (an Oklahoma curiosity in which routine licensing tasks are privatized) will be provided with the scanning tools right off the bat, or if I'll have to stand in line at a DPS office.

So saith Professor Reynolds, after reading (via the BBC) about the coining of the neologism "blogeoisie" to describe the class of people who take part in this odd activity called blogging.

Of course, my handful of regular readers will have seen it here way back in April.

April 2002, that is.

* * * * * * * * * *

Update, 10:30 pm: Reynolds has updated his original item with the following:

He's never been here; of course he doesn't remember seeing it.

And isn't it a kick in the patoot? When I finally get an Instalanche of sorts, it's to something that isn't even in the blog. When I switched over to MT last year, I entertained (briefly) the idea of incorporating the Vent items as a category within MT. Maybe I should have.

So I looked at that number, blinked, and figured it must have been a punchline at some point or another:

But apparently it's for real, and belongs to this guy; it's not mentioned on his Web site, but it does appear in his ad on the back cover of one of our multitudinous local phone books.

It could be worse, I suppose. God forbid there should be, for instance, an anorexia support group at 1-877-2 GO BARF.

Bitter Hag, who's been mentioned in these pages before, is going to undertake something next month that would probably kill the likes of me: she's taking part in AIDS/Life Cycle 2, which is a seven-day bicycle ride from San Francisco to Los Angeles.

You heard me. San Francisco to Los Angeles. Five hundred eighty-five miles. Even when I was a mad cycling fool in my younger days, I never did 80-plus miles a day for a whole week. My tailbone hurts just thinking about it.

This being a charity event, she's lined up over $2500 in sponsorship money from readers of her journal. And barring complete and utter catastrophe — say, San Andreas widening by a couple of miles, plunging Highway 1 into the Pacific — there's not a chance in hell she'll let us down, either.

Good luck, BH. Enjoy that hot tub at the end of Day 7.

A couple of gems I came across during routine surfing, which I'm happy to pass on to you.

First, Balloon Juice's John Cole, on the call (by Limbaugh and others) to end affirmative action, citing the Jayson Blair scandal as justification:

Has anyone yet set up a Howell Raines Countdown Clock?

And SurlyPundit has this to say about exposing college students to Serious Literature:

I read a lot of Coleridge in my younger days, and I think I've proven her point. Pass the slaw.

Canada's National Post reports that as many as three percent of Canadians feel some sexual attraction toward children, a figure obtained from the psychiatrists who treat sex offenders in the Great White North. This seems a bit high to me, and indeed the phrasing in the article — "up to 3%" — suggests that the bigger number is there just for bigger impact.

The Post story quotes Dr John Bradford, clinical director of forensic psychiatry and the sexual behaviours clinic at the Royal Ottawa Hospital, as saying that statistically, a child is more likely to be killed by a parent than by a pedophile, a statement which set off Susanna Cornett's BS detector:

I don't know if the article was intended to whitewash pedophilia, but there's a definite air of "Why are we picking on these people? They're not violent or anything." Neither are embezzlers, generally, but we have no problem picking on them.

Pedophiles, in fact, have one thing in common with embezzlers: they've violated a trust, spat on a relationship that is fundamental to society. Whether or not they actually draw blood is irrelevant.

He's probably going to get some sort of retrograde facelift, and I fear they'll take his musket away, but the UMass Minuteman is staying, at least for now. An outpouring of support from Massachusetts residents — and, perhaps more persuasively, an upsurge in orders for Minuteman schwag — has led the school to reconsider its decision to replace the fellow with a gray wolf.

(Muchas gracias: Joanne Jacobs.)

As American traditions go, the Sunday drive is definitely on the wane, shunted aside by our longer workweeks — gotta husband that leisure time carefully, doncha know — and sporadic haranguing by green types in blue states (or is that blue types in green states?) who object to any use of fuel that isn't on their Approved List. All the more reason, I figure, to take one when the schedule permits, and having gotten today's chores done early for once (clean up the bathrooms, do two loads of wash, defrag four drive partitions), I packed up some suitable tunes and hit the road. (Fred will be happy to hear that today's selections were chosen from the 1963 archives.)

Central Oklahoma, laid out mostly like a waffle iron, doesn't have anything quite like L.A.'s Mullholland Drive, but getting off the beaten path doesn't require an hour down the Interstate, either. I set the northern boundary at Wilshire, which in the city proper is noted for being halfway between 63rd and Britton Road, but which offers a quirk throughout its entire discontinuous thirty-mile length: it is at Wilshire where the section lines, and therefore the major roads which follow them, are supposedly adjusted slightly to allow for the curvature of the earth. Intersections at Wilshire are therefore decidedly non-standard, though seldom as perverse as, say, New Jersey jughandles.

I picked up Wilshire on the east side at the 9000 block, on the far side of one of those discontinuities, mainly because Douglas, which was a perfectly respectable suburban boulevard a few miles ago, shrinks as it goes; at this point, it's down to 1.4 lanes and won't go any further. It wasn't entirely clear whether I was within the city limits or not, since the intersection isn't marked. Heading eastward, I set a 40-mph pace, subject to road conditions, and observed.

Oklahoma City, for reasons having to do with ancient history — "ancient" in this part of the world meaning "before 1907" — is centered, not in the middle of the county, but towards its southwest corner. So this area, which starts maybe four miles from the county center, is almost entirely rural. The roads range from not bad to fairly grungy to downright awful, and they seem to change from one category to another just about every mile. Actual farming still goes on here, though it's sort of offputting to see a farm with a street address (911 insists); I saw three tractors in use, and two of them were apparently being operated by women. There were big houses and small houses, presumably designed for form rather than function; the overdesigned monstrosities in the newer developments simply don't exist out here. Someone who lives out this way who isn't farming, I have to assume, is here to get away from the rest of the world; it's hard to happen upon this neck of the woods by accident.

Somewhere around the 19300 block, there's a four-way intersection with three dead ends. Rather than back up, I chose the right turn, and found myself on a winding (well, sort of) two-lane that, surprisingly, had two houses for sale, one of which was open for inspection. And apparently I'd misjudged my location somewhat, because the open house was on a lakefront — which explains the multiple dead ends, anyway. I wheeled around in a hurry and got out of there, lest I be smitten by the place.

Rethreading myself, I headed south on Luther Road and noticed that all of a sudden I was getting seriously strong cell signals. A couple miles later, I spied the tower, which happened to be a few yards from an electrical power plant. Probably the same one that supplies my juice, even. I've lived in the eastern half of the county for most of the last twenty years, and I had no idea it was even there. "I really must get out more," I decided.

And eventually I turned back westward, following Reno Avenue, the main drag through the east end, wondering what Serious Urban Planners would think of it, what with little crapbox country houses cheek by jowl with overwrought suburban McMansions, and, this being Oklahoma, a church every mile. I suspect they'd be appalled at the lack of stylistic unity, the mailboxes that haven't seen a coat of paint since the Korean War, the little gas stations where you can get your fishing and hunting licenses, and the mere fact that people are living way the hell out here a good fifteen miles from downtown and twenty miles from major shopping areas, thereby wasting precious fuelstuffs on the way. Why, I must have wasted a good two bucks' worth just looking at these things. (Which was still cheaper than dinner: $5.77 at Braum's.)

And, yes, I enjoyed every minute of it.

As of this writing, this blogeoisie business has snagged me a whole 53 hits from Glenn Reynolds.

Evidently this cause isn't as célèbre as I might have thought.

I bought a new phone for my desk at home: a black, decidedly unsleek box with a speaker at the top and a Caller ID screen just below. I should have known that something was askew when I found no directions for setting the machine's clock.

No, really. You're supposed to let the Caller ID information set the initial time, once you get an actual phone call. Well, okay, it's usually fairly accurate, considering it's from the phone company and all, so I punched up the number on my cell phone and noted that yes, this does work.

And it keeps pretty good time so long as I don't use the cordless on the same line. I don't know what this phenomenon is — some sort of cosmic drain on ringer equivalence, maybe — but if I spend an hour on the cordless, the desk phone will lose ten minutes.

I should hook this up to my fax machine, which gains ten minutes a day, and see if they annihilate one another in a massive explosion of isochronic particles.

White House press secretary Ari Fleischer has never been one of my favorite people, but surely he deserves a kinder fate than this.

I spend way too much time wondering what life would be like if I could drag myself away from the 9-to-5 routine (which, in practice, is more like 6:45 to 5) and go do something incredible. Or even something credible, fercryingoutloud.

David "Clubbeaux" Sims wastes no time wondering. He's packing up the clan and moving to historic (and gorgeous) Antalya, in the Turkish Republic.

Normally I mutter things under my breath like "Lucky bastard," but this isn't at all a matter of luck; it's simply something he wants to do, and do it he will.

He'll still be blogging for a while, until the logistics get complicated, and he may resume once the family gets settled. In the meantime, I wish him well, and wish I could conceal my envy just a little bit better.

After six weeks or so of Blogshares, I'm starting to understand the day-trader mindset. I don't really have sufficient greed to make it work to maximum efficiency, but constantly tweaking the portfolio does seem to produce worthwhile returns; I'm averaging about eight or nine transactions a day (yes, Virginia, I'm a paying customer), and I make funny money on almost every one of them.

Now if I just could figure out some way to make my 401(k) work this well....

George Will, speculating on how the Supreme Court will rule on the University of Michigan affirmative action case, as reported by James Joyner at Outside the Beltway:

Brennan a pragmatist? Who knew?

(And with this, OTB goes onto the blogroll, using my standard criterion, which is "I can't believe you haven't linked this guy yet, considering how many times you've read his blog.")

The Minuteman may be safe, for now; but what UMass giveth, Ole Miss taketh away.

Colonel Reb, the old Southern (make that Suthun) gentleman who represents the University of Mississippi, may be headed for a makeover; Ole Miss AD Pete Boone says the Colonel is "an 18th-century person," and obviously we can't have such people hanging around in the twenty-first.

Then again, it's not like the Colonel is waving a Confederate flag or anything.

(Via Tongue Tied)

Daniel Fears, the Sallisaw teenager accused of a shooting spree last fall that killed two and injured eight others, has been ruled competent to stand trial. A preliminary hearing has been set for the 2nd of September; in the meantime, Fears remains in the Sequoyah County jail.

During the competency hearing, it was disclosed that Fears identifies with Dr Hannibal Lecter (please tell me he didn't do this to impress Clarice), and believes he is influenced by extraterrestrials (something I doubt Dr Lecter would endorse).

Can it be thirty-six weeks since Bigwig brought forth upon this earth the very first Carnival of the Vanities?

(Well, actually, no, it can't; see Ravenwood's first comment below. In the absence of a good excuse, I'm going to claim that I had Susanna on my mind when I thought up the title.)

This week's roundup of the Best of the Blogs is brought to you by cut on the bias, and I'd recommend it highly even if there were something of mine in it.

(Oh, wait: there is.)

Last night's nightmare is noteworthy for (1) not being particularly awful and (2) borrowing part of a plot line from George Roy Hill's A Little Romance.

She's twelve or thirteen; I'm a few months older. And while Iowa isn't all that bad, or so it seems to me, she's hungry for adventure, which explains how we're on a flight to Frankfurt acting like, well, a couple of kids. (Who would have thought Lufthansa served up decent meals?)

Actually, there are a couple of deviations from the plot line, because we're not going to the Bridge of Sighs or indeed anywhere specific; we're just in a whirl of our own. And really, the object of my affections here is a bit closer to Fairuza Balk than to Diane Lane — although this presumes that Fairuza Balk hadn't quite learned how to be scary at that age: think Return to Oz.

Sexual content? Nada. There's a bubble-bath scene that wouldn't have raised an eyebrow on the Disney Channel. And in an incident in Iowa, the spectre of yard work has raised its grubby head, and while I'm wielding the garden hose, her Roseannesque mother says "Keep that thing handy, in case I have to hose you two down."

Not to worry. We're too busy being giddy to get into that sort of thing. Yet.

There were, of course, a couple of nuances that bugged me. At some point during dinner on the plane (steak au poivre, I think it was), I lapsed into an inventory of our combined finances, su