Thanks to everyone who offered kind words while I wrestled with the reality of my sister's death. I've put together a few thoughts, though I've decided that they would fit better in the Vent area than here; you can read them at Vent #351.

I'm all right. A little tearful, maybe, and filled with the sort of regret that comes with knowing that none of us were there for her last moments (no greater fear have I than to die alone, unnoticed and unmourned), but I'm all right.

And to correct the earlier item: apparently some sort of service was held after all.

As everyone knows by now, the RIAA has declared a jihad on people who swap music files, and regardless of my opinion of the premise that customers who buy "intellectual property" don't quite own it, this particular offensive strikes me as so clueless, so ill-advised, so devoid of common sense, so violently opposed to building a bridge to what's left of the RIAA's customer base, that I really don't understand why Terry McAuliffe isn't getting paid some sort of royalties for it.

Another wrinkle now suggests itself, and the suggestion arises from this single line at Fly Over Country:

Live U2 stuff being generally unreleased (we used to call such things "bootlegs"), there's no possible way the record company is losing any revenue off this kind of material. Therefore, I must assume, any RIAA efforts to stomp out distribution of same far exceed whatever dubious legitimacy the DMCA has conferred upon the jihad — unless, of course, they have a note from Bono.

(This reasoning would not, of course, apply to material that has been released but has been locked up in the vaults, such as the Cameo-Parkway catalog; the company's ownership of that material is not in doubt.)

I've seldom found any need to link to anything in the Tulsa World, and that's a good thing, since I can't, as Bruce explains:

In brief: tulsaworld.com is free to actual newspaper subscribers, $45 a year to the rest of the world. I will be indeed surprised if more than a handful of people have actually paid for site access.

I don't get too worked up over newspaper-site registration — I signed up for NewsOK.com (The Daily Oklahoman's joint venture with KWTV) because I don't have time to read the dead-tree edition, for the Star Tribune to read Lileks' Backfence column, for The New York Times because sometimes I need to follow up a news link, and for dallasnews.com because every once in a while I need something from the archives and they can generally fetch it on the first try — but $45 a year seems a bit stiff, especially since there are much more specialized databases on the Web which don't cost so much. Still, there aren't many alternatives in T-town: Tulsa Today suffers from hideous design, spastic writing and an erratic schedule, and the suburban papers offer even less.

Griffin Communications, which owns KWTV, also owns Tulsa's KOTV. Bruce doesn't like them either. A perfunctory look at their site suggests that there might be good reasons not to like them; for my part, I distrust any site that gives Fahrenheit temperatures to the first decimal place, like 98.4, as though the reading were obtained from a rectal thermometer. I defer to Tulsa residents on the question of where said thermometer might be inserted.

My POP3 mail client (yes, the dreaded Outlook Express) is set to render all HTML mail as plain text, mainly because, well, I hate HTML mail; if you've got something to say to me, you don't need to tart it up with background graphics and font combinations worthy of a ransom note. What's more, those cute little Web bugs that often come with it, externally-loaded graphics that, by mere dint of having been loaded, verify one's email address for the sake of spammers, get swatted at the very lowest level.

Sometimes, once the formatting is swept away, what's left is almost amusing. The following blank verse is the plain text that remained from an HTML-based spam sent to this address from 218.70.10.150, a verified spam source:

In the HTML version, you'd see none of these words; they appear in white on a white background, and what you get on top of them is a referral to www.365pharm1.com, a distributor of a Viagra knockoff, whose domain registration traces back to China.

And really, if those hourly booty theatricals were truly arab bottomed, it's no wonder they were terminally blurred.

If you think my World Tour is a bit limited in its scope, wait until you see Tom Daschle's.

(And how, I'd like to know, does one focus a motor trip around the issue of health care?)

(Update, 9:45 am: The Emperor has cast Imperial aspersions upon Daschle's trip and blog. Hilarity ensues.)

A few bomb bits of the bizarre that have crossed my path since my return to the Same Old Place:

• Apparently I didn't burn up my brake pads during my largely-vertical traversal of the Appalachians; the Mazda store, happy to get me in for the 24,000-mile service less than 2000 miles late — of course, I got the 21k service 400 miles early, five weeks beforehand — informed me that I still had about half the original surface left. What's more, they also told me that the power-steering flush they routinely pitch at this mileage would be superfluous, and that they would not attempt to talk me into it. I attribute this to the following: (1) I'm a steady customer who takes care of his vehicle, and (2) they anticipate they'll make a ton of money at 30,000.

• I got a query from a reader regarding a late-period (that is to say, from their stint with Reprise Records) Fugs recording. I responded, and he came back with a shocker: he had first put his question to the eminent musicologist/ purveyor of wacky wax Dr. Demento, and the good Doctor had referred him to — me. This is a degree of egoboo with which I am mostly unfamiliar; it's kind of like having a Linux driver you wrote for some obscure peripheral being blessed by Linus Torvalds himself. (On the other hand, at least one Playboy Playmate drops by here sort of regularly, and I know why, but it's still a shock, considering the unlikelihood of ever meeting one in real life.)

• The banking business evidently has gotten competitive enough that fees are actually coming down; the place where I bank is no longer charging me for online bill-paying, saving me $59 a year (over and above the $90 or so I was saving by not buying stamps), and they didn't tack on a further charge beyond the buck and a half I had to fork over to an ATM in Cockeysville, Maryland for a cash withdrawal from my oft-beleaguered checking account.
  

It may be well to remember that there exists randomness in life, sometimes enough to make things suck less than usual.

The World Tour is over, but that doesn't mean it's going away quietly.

Last Sunday, you'll remember, I wrote about landing in Delaware and meeting up with Fritz Schranck. Now as a general rule, I don't go out of my way to make myself look like an idiot — sometimes, it just comes naturally — so I didn't go into a whole lot of detail regarding my failure to negotiate the foibles of the First State; if you want the really gory details, well, you'll have to go to Fritz.

Maybe I need a "warts and all" category.

Martin Brest is the man behind Gigli — he directed it from his own script — but so far as I can discern from all the negative buzz, the spiritual father of this film is Arthur Carlson, station manager at Cincinnati radio station WKRP. "As God is my witness," said Brest, evidently channeling Carlson, "I thought this turkey would fly."

Turkeys play a role in the film, or at least in its dialogue, being the central image in the least-convincing sexual come-on since — well, since I used to date. Natalie at Pickle Juice is happy to rewrite the line, with considerably more persuasive results.

After six months or so of speculation, the new KOCY AM facility at 1560 kHz is on the air, and it's gone Radio Disney.

If you've spent more than twenty minutes watching the current Disney Channel on cable or satellite, you know what this means: bouncy pop aimed just below the middle-school audience. Nothing more ambitious than, say, Avril's "Sk8terboi", but nothing as noxious, or as dripping with innuendo, as you're likely to hear at your regular Top 40 and/or dance outlets either. Having never quite outgrown the Cuff Links and "Tracy", I'll probably wind up saving a button for this station.

The California conference of the NAACP has announced that it will file a lawsuit to delay the state's gubernatorial-recall election at least 30 days.

Alice Huffman, president of the conference, says the 7 October date "does not leave enough time to educate minority voters about election issues or encourage them to vote." Two other ballot measures are scheduled, one of which is Proposition 54, Ward Connerly's "Racial Privacy Initiative", which if passed would bar the state from collecting racial and national-origin data. And that's apparently the real issue; Rob Howard, president of the north San Diego County branch of the NAACP, has said, "It is extremely difficult to educate people on Prop. 54 because of the time."

So, if I understand this correctly, the vote to recall Gray Davis must be postponed because it will take more than 60 days to energize opposition to Ward Connerly. This makes even less sense than the usual noises from California, and Andy at The World Wide Rant is properly scornful:

There are times when I regret leaving California in the late Eighties. This isn't one of them.

Matt Deatherage objects to the standard description of the Democratic Leadership Council as "moderate" or "centrist":

For "anyone who is not hewing the conservative line," read "Howard Dean," who has indeed been getting flak from the DLC.

The John Birch reference isn't a cheap shot, either. For example: thirty years ago, the Birchers were just about the only group urging that the US back away from the United Nations, an idea now being bounced around the mainstream.

Still, something sounds odd here. Do the vast majority of Americans really support "progressive" ideas? And if so, why is it that Naderites and Greens and their friends do so poorly in actual elections? Surely it isn't just the buckets full of GOP cash. And if it is the buckets full of GOP cash, doesn't that suggest that the voters' "support" for leftish causes is awfully tenuous at best?

This may be ultimately a matter of semantics. The DLC is clearly to the right of the Democratic base. Does this make them "conservative"? If you think the Democratic base is somewhere in the middle, perhaps it does. I've got my doubts.

Heaven help us all.

This is not good. I can barely move, I can't keep my eyes open, and my temperature is holding right around 100.

Yet there's no chance in hell I'll be able to sleep tonight, no matter how much fatigue I may seem to have. I'm thinking that maybe it's time to readjust all those dosages again. Or something.

Then again, I can always blame it on work. "Seven and a half hours into the day, and look at me! I tell you, this place makes people sick."

(Update, 3:50 pm: Well, at least it's probably not flesh-eating bacteria. And if it is, they'll die of excessive engorgement.)

Two chest X-rays, forty bucks worth of drugs, and enough blood drawn to fill up the pit at Spee-D-Loob, and still there's no explanation. White count is acceptable; blood pressure is slightly high, but not enormously so; temperature rose briefly to the 102-103 range.

Heavy antibiotics were prescribed, which suggests an attempt to knock out Rocky Mountain spotted fever, Lyme disease, or some other nifty ailment spread by bloodsuckers.

And yes, they're doubling my tranqs. Just in case.

(Aside to SWINTBN: EPM is on hand, should it be necessary.)

The Professor has bagged himself a Mazda RX-8, the very car I was drooling upon at the local dealership last Friday. (Well, not the same literal car, but you know what I mean.)

What I want to know is: Did he get the stick shift?

I've mostly stayed out of the gay-marriage brouhaha so far. Way back in 1996, I complained about the Defense of Marriage Act, and got a tad hyperbolic in so doing; subsequently I figured it might not be a bad idea to lower my profile on this issue.

But while I haven't exactly recanted, I would rather avoid demonizing the opposition. And along these lines, Moira Breen has precisely the argument I'd been unable to come up with on my own:

Emphasis in the original. Regardless of the hardware possessed by Heather's, um, parental units, marriage is fundamentally about children, about providing them a structure within which they can grow and develop; the partners themselves, like it or not, are secondary players. This is not to say that childless couples don't deserve to have their unions sanctified by church or state or whatever, but the fact remains: marriage is fundamentally about children. Moira again:

Of course, if children did not exist, we would probably not exist either — as the story goes, if your parents didn't have children, neither will you — but since they do, any plan to redefine marriage that doesn't focus primarily on children is going to draw opposition, and, I think, rightfully so. I still don't like DOMA or its preemptive-strike motivation, but proponents of same-sex marriage have yet to offer an alternative that puts the emphasis back where it belongs: on the kids.

(Update, 6 August, 9:30 pm: Bruce at This Is Class Warfare takes exception to this reasoning.)

Someone called Cam Edwards on his radio show this morning with the following question:

The caller objected to this sort of thing, and Cam says he's not too fond of it either, but:

The alternative, of course, is some sort of governmental court that would pass judgment on every employment application, and I can't imagine anyone wanting that — though it could be argued that we already have it.

My Index of Sphericity is on the high side, and I work in the back of 42nd and Treadmill; I doubt they'd care at this point if the customers saw me, but I don't think they ever would have hired me as a receptionist.

In the September Car and Driver, editor-in-chief Csaba Csere says goodbye to technical assistant Mike Lapprich, all of twenty-two, who was killed in an accident in one of their long-term test cars. This isn't the first time a C/D staffer has had a wreck; this isn't even the first time a C/D staffer has died in a wreck. But it's a grim reminder that even the best cars, even the best drivers, are still subject to the Reaper's quota system.

I mention this because when I was turning seven, I came down with double pneumonia and scarlet fever. Simultaneously. I missed nearly two months of school and broke a couple of thermometers. Up to that point, this was about as close as I got to a meeting with that scythe-wielding son of a bitch; I didn't really come close again until 1985, when a petroleum tanker truck making too tight a left turn didn't notice my teensy little sports coupe under his midsection.

Now it's 2003 and I've gotten, so far as can be determined, another visit from the Pneumonia Fairy. This time, he's not presenting himself as particularly harsh, and it seems unlikely that I'll suffer any permanent damage from his little jaunt through my lungs. (The earlier incident, I have always suspected, caused some very specific forms of dain bramage.) But pneumonia comes in a number of different flavors, and scoring a relatively minor one, while something of a relief, isn't exactly a testimonial to my stamina; with a different variety of the disease, I could wind up just as dead as that poor fellow from Car and Driver, and without benefit of having driven the whee out of a 350Z, either.

If there's a lesson here, it's simply this: the number of times you cheat Death equals the number of times you cross his path — minus one.

Regular readers will recall that much of this space over the past three years has been devoted to griping about the music industry. And while I think they've earned every bit of the criticism they've received, assuming that everyone in the business is some sort of villain is neither accurate nor useful.

Last night I had a fairly long talk with the head of a small record label specializing in pop/rock reissues, a chap who qualifies as one of the Good Guys. He's of two minds about the Big Five companies: they control roughly 80 percent of the titles available for reissue, so he has to deal with them, but once that deal is struck, they go out of their way to give him decent service. After all, they have an incentive too: tracks sitting in the vault aren't making them any money.

Unfortunately, they're not making him all that much money either; those license fees are stiff, and the drooling collector-geek crowd (such as, well, me) who can be counted on to buy almost every single release simply isn't large enough to make those releases profitable. As a music buff, he'd like to exhume rare and precious tracks; as a businessman, he knows he has to surround them with familiar stuff to maximize sales potential.

We really didn't get into the piracy question. It seems reasonable to assume that it's probably not doing him any good, but since his label has a reputation for high-quality sound, getting the same recordings as lower-quality MP3s is not likely to appeal to his target audience.

All in all, it was a useful discussion, and while I didn't have a pitch of my own to make, I think I held up my end pretty well. And I have the small comfort of knowing that somewhere in the monstrous, monolithic music industry, there's someone who is actually interested in what I might want to hear.

Most of the time, I can listen to The Diane Rehm Show without so much as cracking a smile; the show is so often deadly earnest that grinning is simply out of the question.

Then there was this morning, when Diane asked guest Jennifer Finney Boylan about the, um, effectiveness of sexual-reassignment surgery, an operation Boylan had undergone and subsequently described in her memoir She's Not There: A Life in Two Genders.

Said Boylan, the surgery was "very good"; she stumbled a bit, then finally quoted Kate Bornstein: "The plumbing works, and so does the electricity."

Well, I thought it was funny.

I rather think the crew from Across the Atlantic were wishing and hoping and thinking and praying they'd get to do Carnival #42, because they're just awash in Hitchhiker's stuff.

Still, even in the #46 slot, it's nice to see that they didn't let it (or Max Quordlepleen) go to waste, and anyway, the Carnival of the Vanities remains the first (and still the initial) weekly roundup of the Best of the Blogs, so you need to read it even if the sight of Eccentrica Galumbitts, the triple-breasted whore of Eroticon VI, leaves you as cold as Marvin's shiny metal keister.

One-third of my freezer is given over to the sort of thing we used to call TV Dinners. I don't eat these in front of the TV, of course; I cart them off to work, one a day, so I have time to wolf down something that doesn't say "Burger King" on the packaging during the meager half-hour I get for lunch.

I was rotating the stock this evening when I noticed something highly unStoufferlike; for some reason, in the midst of all that cardboard, there was actual plastic. A tilt of the stack, and out it came: a CD I had burned late last year, in one of those half-height not-exactly-jewel boxes, a hot mix literally put on ice.

I doubt that the cover art would have put anyone off his appetite or anything, but audio products in general do not belong in the freezer. And God only knows how long it's been there: I know how it got there — obviously I pulled the disc when I got back from the supermarket, dropped it into one of the sacks and then forgot about it — but the last time I went grocery-shopping was last Thursday, and I didn't take this disc with me, and I'd been on the road for rather a long time before that, so the latest this could have occurred is, um, the fifth of July.

Oh, and it plays just fine. Bless you, Verbatim.

I haven't priced the British edition of Elle lately, and thanks to Kevin at Wizbang, I don't have to.

(Note: A number of comments to this post have been removed due to some seriously inappropriate content, for which I alone am to blame.)

A between-segments filler item on NPR's Morning Edition today reported the renaming of the Daniel Boone Parkway in Kentucky, which will now be the Hal Rogers Parkway. Susanna Cornett is just appalled:

I rather doubt the new name will catch on with the residents. I've never driven the Daniel Boone, but I have driven the Cumberland, and truth be told, nothing about it reminded me even slightly about Louie B. Nunn. Kevin McGehee suggested that this practice should be restricted to dead politicians, which has a certain appeal, but it would definitely throw a spanner (lower-primate variety) into the efforts of some GOP Congressional types who would like to paste Ronald Reagan's name on everything between Bethesda and Alexandria, and frankly, I'm glad my uncle, who devoted his life to parks and recreation in Austin, Texas, got to see a new park with his name on it before he died in 2001.

Memo to Al Sharpton: The news media aren't ignoring your candidacy because you're black; the news media are ignoring your candidacy because you're a national punchline. They'd do the same for Johnny Knoxville if he were running for governor of Tennessee.

Workers cleaning pumps at the Canton, Oklahoma water department last night accidentally spilled 250 gallons of hydrochloric acid into the town's water supply.

There is no truth to the rumor that Pfizer is airlifting ten thousand rolls of Rolaids to the stricken community.

Get your minds out of the gutter. (Yes, I know this was a favorite phrase of my high-school class, but climb up on the curb for a moment, fercrissake.)

Chris Lawrence, a cheerful fellow I met up at Dean Esmay's birthday party last month, runs a site called I69Info.com, all about Interstate 69, the very road I took out of Indianapolis to start my trek up to Dean's place, and how it's eventually going to be extended south. Way south. I'm talking south Texas here.

The number of motor vehicles in this country is increasing faster than the number of miles of roadway, so I'm definitely interested in stuff like this, if only because I may need to drive somewhere someday.

One of the traditions at Frosty Troy's Oklahoma Observer is the Christmastime doll list, consisting of a series of oneliners along the lines of "The Carroll Fisher doll: wind it up and it carries drinks across town." Easy to do, harder to do funny.

JunkYardBlog has revisited this tradition with generally amusing results. The Al Gore doll? "[It] would probably be slightly more lifelike than he is, but would take five minutes to say a single sentence." Remind me not to buy batteries.

Consider this:

Glenn Reynolds didn't say that, but it is the second anniversary of InstaPundit, and really, it doesn't seem possible: two whole years?

The Prof obligingly provides a link to his first posts. Historical continuity, y'know.

Oh, that pull quote? That was from me, under similar chronological circumstances.

Folks on the sodden Eastern Seaboard will scoff, but out here on the Really Dry Prairie, we've had only about thirteen inches of rain this year, 40 percent below average. Agriculture, of course, is suffering badly, and Governor Henry has asked USDA Secretary Ann Veneman to declare 62 of Oklahoma's 77 counties disaster areas.

Is it officially a drought? Depends on whom you ask. Lawns haven't turned toasty yet, and water rationing in the cities is still somewhere in the future, but cotton and peanuts, among the state's summer crops, are in notably bad shape, and ranchers are selling off cattle for lack of forage.

The full-service car wash a couple miles away has a sign up: MAKE IT RAIN. WASH YOUR CAR. If only it were that simple.

The envelope was eleven inches long, almost that high, and when I see something like that, I always wonder why someone needs to shriek "Mine's bigger!"

But I opened this one anyway, and well, looky here: a letter from Nancy Pelosi, identified as "House Democratic Leader" under her name. She is indeed that, but considering that this is basically a fundraising letter, and that anyone likely to send her a check presumably already knows this, it strikes me as just a hair superfluous. You don't think so? Fair enough. Maybe just the second iteration is superfluous.

Most of what's left is one of those surveys wherein calling the questions "leading" is rather like calling Monica Bellucci "sorta cute". Here's the second question from Part VII: "How concerned are you that the Roe v. Wade ruling could be overturned with the addition of one more anti-choice Justice to the Supreme Court?"

Suggested donation, incidentally, is $35. The last page is a sheet of preprinted, precut address labels with a nice US flag and my street address; even using every abbreviation in the postal manual, the last character of the address is sliced in two by the die-cutting process. Evidently, when they ran these through the machine, they cut them too far to the left.

Matt Deatherage's Top Ten Bath & Body Works Rejected Scents:

10. Cape Cod Cod
  9. Kale Rub
  8. Sparkling Ex-Lax
  7. Vermicious Vanilla
  6. Aromathuggery
  5. Natural Gas
  4. Fresh Prairie Grasshopper
  3. Creamy Placenta
  2. Mountain Compost
  1. Forest Whitaker

Uh, thanks, Matt.

KWEY-FM in Weatherford would seem to have it pretty good; they're the only FM in town, they pump out 100,000 watts all over western Oklahoma, and they've got an AM facility to boot.

So why would they want to make themselves over as a lowly 6,000-watt rimshooter in Blanchard? [Adobe Acrobat Reader required; here's a Microsoft Word version.]

The easy answer is "They want a shot at those big-city bucks," but how many of those bucks will they be able to pull? Six kilowatts isn't squat from that far away; indeed, the FCC's proposed change to the FM allocation table states that "the proposed 70 dBu ["city-grade"] signal for a Channel 247A [97.3 MHz] facility at Blanchard [does not cover] any part of any urbanized area." So I'm thinking that maybe they want to sell this station, and they don't think they'll get a buyer out there in Weatherford.

The FCC will take comments on this proposal until 22 September; I'm tempted to weigh in with a simple "What are they, nuts?"

The number of readers dropped off considerably during the World Tour, something I hadn't been expecting — the regulars stuck by, but occasionals who rely on pings were presumably let down by the lower volume thereof — but I got a spike yesterday, from, of all places, The Bitch Girls.

Would this be called a "Bitchalanche?" Maybe. I do know that almost 20 percent of yesterday's visitors came from this entry by the self-described Bitter Bitch, to whom I am profoundly (and perhaps even profanely) grateful. I usually don't do this well with the freaking Carnival.

As a lede for a story, this is hard to top:

I'm sure there was more to it than that, but here's the backstory:

In 1864, the Confederate States of America was not doing as well as it had hoped, and Charleston Harbor had been effectively blockaded by Union forces. In response, the Confederacy had developed a submarine. CSS Hunley looked something like an old boiler converted for marine use, largely because it was. Its armament was equally low-tech: a front-mounted harpoon which would ram enemy vessels, leaving behind enough of an explosive charge to blow them up while the Hunley, they hoped, would back away in time.

It worked well enough in its one and only test: on 17 February 1864 the Hunley took out the Union blockade vessel USS Housatonic. The Hunley resurfaced briefly, but never returned to port, and lay on the bottom of Charleston Harbor for over a century. In 1995, divers found the sub, and in 2000, it was raised from the sea and sent to a laboratory near Charleston for study.

Which brings us to that time difference. The study team is trying to figure out how long the Hunley might have survived after the attack. Survivors from the Housatonic — only five sailors were lost to the Union — reported that the attack came between 8:45 and 9 pm. One of the artifacts recovered from the Hunley was the pocket watch carried by Lt. George Dixon, the sub's commanding officer. It's frozen at 8:23, presumably by the action of seawater.

The Confederacy, it seems, operated on local sun time; at the time, all US naval vessels were synchronized to sun time at Washington, DC. The difference between the two is about twenty-six minutes. The attack on the Housatonic took at most five minutes; if it began at 8:45 Union time — 8:19 local Charleston time — it's possible that the Hunley was so heavily damaged itself by the attack that only the one brief surfacing was possible before the sub was dragged off to Davy Jones' locker.

It's probably more than 26 minutes too early to say for sure, but this explanation seems plausible enough, unless perhaps you're a descendant of Lt. Dixon or one of his crewmen.

Oh, and standard time zones were implemented across the States in 1883.

(Suggested by Fark)

All the ads say — and almost everyone I've talked to confirms — that you can order replacement checks for your checking account from any reputable printer, not just the one with whom your financial institution is affiliated.

Unless you bank with Wells Fargo, as Kim at Revolving Duck is unhappy to report.

If you're a guy, the OkiePundit is not interested in seeing your rump:

Don't ask me. I'm still trying to decide if "ugly-ass", in this context, is redundant.

I truly hate to blow my own horn, but since no one is going to do it for me, let this be the official announcement of the 300,000th visitor to this site.

Despite two different URLs and two different counter services over seven years, the count from Day One (9 April 1996) is continuous; number 200,000 arrived on 9 December 2002.

Things would seem to be picking up, albeit slowly. And, of course, 300,000 is a slow week for the likes of InstaPundit, but what the hell.

The person identified as #300,000 in the records, should you be curious, came from IP 198.81.26.143, which appears to be an AOL address; what drove him here at 12:33 this morning was this About.com page about Chuck Woolery which links to this Single File item. The counter, while it does pick up that page, doesn't display the count, so he will never know. Not that he'd be likely to care.

Of course, I have no life: I stayed up to watch.

There's a very nice piece by Tom Lindley in The Sunday Oklahoman today about life in the Panhandle, a place that to most of us is "no man's land, a thin slice of hardship and desolation sandwiched between prairie and blue sky somewhere north of Amarillo."

That very hardship, though, may be an advantage to residents of the narrow three-county strip: whatever problem you throw at them, it's probably not so different from one they've already seen and already solved. Right now, the area is enjoying an influx of Latino immigration, some of it legal, as meat processing, a Hispanic stronghold for generations, continues to flourish in an otherwise-struggling economy. These people want to work, and in the Panhandle, that's a good thing; as Mayor Jess Nelson of Guymon says, "People here are hardworking people or they don't stay."

As the phrase goes, Read The Whole Thing.

On this entry yesterday, I posted the following comment:

At the time, I wondered if maybe "desperately" was too strong a word. Now I don't. Here's John McWhorter in the New York Post on the culture so airily dismissed as "urban":

I take issue with McWhorter's negative characterization of "The Message" elsewhere in his article — to me, it's far more an expression of despair than a call to street action, and besides, it's a damned good record — but for the most part, he's nailed it. Replacing "Tha Man hates us 'cause we're black" with "Tha Man hates us 'cause we're assholes" is not my idea of an improvement.

(Muchas gracias: Phillip "delusional duck" Coons.)

I am no kind of bluegrass expert. On the other hand, my father was, and is, a devotee of the sort of country music that grew out of bluegrass, and resisted the orchestral intrusions that followed, which inevitably meant that I grew up with Lefty Frizzell and Webb Pierce and Kitty Wells and Ernest Tubb; taking a step or two sideways up into the hills was not so difficult for me.

The advantage of being no kind of expert, of course, is that there are still plenty of discoveries to be made, and one of those discoveries, for me, was a store. And what a store it is: County Sales, down the hill from something or other in beautiful downtown Floyd, Virginia, seems to be the repository for all that is good and melodious in Appalachia. Fred First and I wandered into the modest little operation, and I was instantly smitten: there was enough there to justify filing by label and catalog number. (At the time, I didn't know they also did a thriving mail-order and Web business.) I snagged an Alison Krauss album I hadn't seen before, and asked the staff about late-Fifties/early-Sixties Starday recordings of the Stanley Brothers. Somewhere a lamb shook his tail twice, and before the second shake was quite through they'd come up with a 4CD box set. I didn't want to schlep this all the way across the country and have it melt down on me in the trunk, so I asked them to mail it out when I got home, which they did.

And yes, I suppose I could have gotten the same box set from amazon.com, but I wouldn't have had the thrill of browsing the old store, and I would have had to fork out an extra eleven bucks to boot. God only knows what it would have cost to special-order it from one of our wondrously-uninformed chain stores.

Senator James Inhofe (R-OK), in an effort to nail down some point or other on global warming, offered a quote from science writer (and blogger) David Appell. By the now-nefarious process of Dowdification, he managed to totally misrepresent Appell's point.

What Appell had said was this:

Inhofe, or more likely his handlers, eliminated the qualification "near the top of this range" and substituted the term "global warming", which served his putative purpose of making scientific types like Appell look like alarmists. For those of us who tend toward the skeptical side on this issue, Inhofe's action actually weakens the skeptical position: it creates the impression that we can't be trusted with the data.

Back at home, Bruce puts the screws to Inhofe:

For "sponsors", read "fossil-fuel promoters".

Basically a Dick Armey with lower pesticide residues, Jim Inhofe's major concern, first and foremost, is the care and feeding of Jim Inhofe. This isn't exactly atypical in the Senate, and his record of nonaccomplishment is better than some Senators' record of antiaccomplishment, but every time he opens his mouth, I think, "Can't we do better than this?"

It's a month before the anniversary of the date which will live in infamy as "9/11", and I admit to having given the matter little thought.

In the meantime, Michele reminds us:

Just a reminder. It's here because I need it too.

It began, apparently, with this observation from Jeff "Alphecca" Soyer:

I understand his impatience with weird blogroll divisions — I find some of them utterly incomprehensible — but some of them seem eminently justified. Spoons, for instance, divides his up into "Everyday", "Occasionals", and "The Other Side"; not all of us say so, but I suspect most of us have similar divisions in the back of our minds, if not coded into our templates. Of the hundred or so items on my blogroll, maybe twelve or fourteen get read every day, owing to the tedious necessity of having to earn a living, which requires the allocation of a finite (and sometimes, it seems, infinite) number of hours away from the Blogosphere™.

Still, I like my alphabetical arrangement, even if it's a lot more arbitrary than it seems: Dean's World is listed as "Dean", not as "Esmay", but Dr. Weevil duly shows up in the W's. It is indeed a pain in the neck to maintain, especially for someone who keeps changing the name of the blog. (Yes, Mr. Duck, I'm talking to you.) But so far, no one has complained about it, which must be reckoned a Good Thing.

And none of this really addresses Alphecca's subtext, which is "How do I get on the blogroll?" I have no hard-and-fast rules; I used to say "If I read you five times, the fifth time you go on," but there are lots of people I have read more than five times who haven't been added yet. Then there's the curious case of Acidman, whom I dropped when he announced he was going on hiatus — knowing Acidman, I'm sure it was actually a loatus — and forgot to reinstate when he returned.

Of course, if you want to get to the top of my blogroll, you might want to identify yourself as, say, Aardvark A. Aarhus.

The Professor tells us what it's like to whip a Mazda RX-8 around town and out in the twisties.

Which means, for me as a D-list blogger anyway, that it's time I finished off this box of Cheerios and did some testing on the little metal NASCAR simulacrum packed therein.

So I'm reading someone's tale of angst regarding her hosting service, and she's calling for recommendations, and I duly put in a plug for the fine folks who host this site, with the following caveat:

My conscience was clean.

Then, of course, I posted the entry just prior to this one, and the server errored out. Easy recovery, but bad timing, guys.

The University of California owns US patent number 5,838,906, granted in 1998 after a four-year wait, which describes a method for embedding executable code in a Web page and a means to execute it in a browser. The University has engaged Eolas Technologies to administer this patent.

Eolas quickly hit upon an administration tool: sue the pants off Microsoft, whose ActiveX controls constitute a method for embedding executable code in a Web page and a means to execute it in a browser. The suit was filed in 1999, and yesterday a jury found that Microsoft was liable for infringement of the California patent. Damages of $520.6 million were assessed.

Bill Gates, of course, could pull this sum out of petty cash, though Microsoft can be expected to fight this tooth and nail — at least until the patent expires. And rival browsers might also be considered to be infringing upon the patent, but makers of rival browsers don't have this kind of money.

How hostile are you?

Well, you know I can't pass up a test like this. And forty-six A or B answers later:

Well, the hell with that. :)

(Muchas gracias: Altered Perceptions.)

So what would happen if the National Education Association got to run a school?

Seven years ago, the NEA, staked with $1.5 million, decided to get into the admininstrative side of the Ed Biz. The Charter School Initiative, for all its flowery prose, managed to open a total of four schools (out of six planned), and their track record is — well, here's a report from the Education Intelligence Agency. You decide:

Is this the Peter Principle in action? I can already hear Cam Edwards ready to pounce.

(From Education Weak, via Joanne Jacobs.)

Lileks on the various varieties of vodka:

Can't wait until the Rev. Mr. Green gets hold of this.

Five thousand people turned out at Gallagher-Iba Arena in Stillwater to hear six of the nine Democratic presidential candidates (no-shows: Graham, Kerry, Sharpton) attempt to explain why it's necessary to replace George W. Bush with one of them.

On the hot-button issues, Edwards and Lieberman weren't willing to support same-sex marriages, and Braun said they were essentially identical to interracial marriages. Lieberman ventured the view that some of his colleagues wouldn't know a just war if it bit them. Kucinich wants the US to admit that it was a bad idea to invade Iraq. Dean said that he's actually balanced budgets before. But the Quote of the Day came from Gephardt:

The Democratic primary is 3 February. Expect more of the same over the next six months.

Acting on the reasonable assumption that if one Republican babe is good, two must be better, the women of Right We Are! have put their heads together and come up with this week's edition of Carnival of the Vanities, the best of the blogs in one fell swoop, the forty-seventh incarnation thereof since the Decree of Bigwig.

As always, it's a must.

Blasted are the users, for they are afflicted with that damnable MSBlast thing. Among the blasted: the Oklahoma State Supreme Court.

I'm not even sure I want to boot up the Road Warrior tonight.

(Update, 9 pm: My trusty notebook is just fine — evidently I downloaded the pertinent patch some time during the World Tour, probably while running to the ice machine at the hotel — but Norton jumped in with a scream screen anyway, mainly because it's been almost a year since Symantec got paid.)

McGehee channeling Fine Young Cannibals?

I wouldn't have thought it possible, but this is both raw and cooked.

Which, of course, is more than enough justification right there.

Matt Moore of The Blog of the Century of the Week, having discovered that nothing rolls the meter faster than dubious polls, is conducting the Second Annual Sexiest Female Blogger competition.

Last year, you may remember, I nominated Susanna Cornett for this lofty position; she is still speaking to me as of this writing, but I'm not at all certain I want to go through this sort of thing again.

What's that you say? Sexiest Male Blogger competition? Well, ganders are equal under the Sauce Laws. And the number of people who would vote for me can be counted on the fingers of no hands, so I don't really have to worry about it.

Probably not — the economy still seems to be sputtering — but for the first time in two years, state revenues in Oklahoma have actually exceeded projections.

The projections have been very conservative, what with the state's budget in the tank, but the numbers are encouraging just the same; three more quarters like this and we can stash some money in the Rainy Day Fund and shave a quarter-point off the state income tax.

SurlyPundit would like to visit New York, and a lot of the usual reasons apply, but her reasoning behind those reasons is interesting:

(Internal links added by me.)

Some of our off-jackers will be unimpressed — "So our dead white men are just as good as their dead white men?" — but out here on the prairie, we do our damnedest to preserve the good stuff because, well, that's just the sort of thing we do.

Scott Charney, Microsoft's go-to guy for security matters, told developers at Tech.Ed 2003 in Brisbane, Australia that "half of all crashes in Windows are caused not by Microsoft code, but third-party code."

Of course, this means that half of all crashes in Windows are caused by Microsoft code.

The Golden State's list of gubernatorial wannabes carries, at most, one surprise, and it was no surprise to me:

Gallagher's first name.

The following item is from 1999. Really. However, since I only found it last night, while following up some of the items in my referrer log, I have no qualms about reprinting it today, especially since my reaction to it is the same today as it would have been four years ago. The source is Breakup Girl's SuperList, a worthy protoblog that unfortunately didn't make it into the current version of the site. (I did update the link.)

All thoughts of Sharon Stone aside — just 70 percent?

When my daughter and I talk, topics fly fast and furiously, and somewhere alongside the consideration of convertibles, real estate and the perfidy of Toyota starters, she wondered: "Would there be this much news coverage if the power went off in the middle of the country?"

I thought for a moment, then answered: "Well, yes, but most of it would be on The Weather Channel, because we'd be in the middle of a farging ice storm."

In the background, I can hear the air conditioner kicking in.

Rachael at Mookie Riffic has issued the Idiot's Guide to Teenage Dating. Not having dated any teenagers since I was, um, fifteen, and inasmuch as my children are well into their twenties and more or less permanently attached, I don't quite know why I noticed this, but what the heck. Here's the very first rule:

Apart from the minor pronoun issue, this seems to be eminently sensible. There are nine more, seven if you count 8 through 10 as a single item, which you probably could.

For a medium-sized market, Oklahoma City seems to have an awful lot of weird radio stories.

The latest (found at a thread at Radio-Info.com) involves Ralph Tyler, owner of KTSH in Tishomingo, mentioned before in this space because Tyler had applied to move the station to Tuttle, on the edge of the Oklahoma City metro. (A separate Tyler company, not owned by Ralph Tyler, had successfully moved other stations into the area.)

The FCC apparently discovered that Tyler's acquisition of KTSH from a small Christian broadcaster didn't go quite the way the transfer application claimed, and the resulting consent decree [requires Adobe Acrobat Reader] calls for Tyler to give up the license for the station and to divest himself of his interests in two other stations, one of which is the newly-hatched KOCY. The application to move KTSH to Tuttle will, of course, be dismissed.

Given the fact that blatant violations of so-called "decency" rules will get a station owner a stiff fine at worst, I've got to wonder just how horrendous those misrepresentations in that transfer application really are.

Lynn Sislo administers a semi-detached suburban quasi-fisking to this MSNBC piece, and while I was reading her specifications for writing a classical-music editorial, I remembered this thing I wrote last year. Let's see if I meet her standards:

Apart from claiming that Seventies LP pressings from Europe were better, I didn't have much to say about the Continent, but I did issue the pertinent lament. One-half point.

I didn't do that.

I didn't do that, either.

"[I]t is assumed we won't buy unless we are assured we're getting something with established market appeal." I'd say this probably eliminates Pierrot lunaire somewhere along the way. One-half point.

Never. :)

Do you get the feeling that twelve-tone is the cod-liver oil of music? It's supposed to be good for what ails us, but damn, it's hard to swallow.

"[The] audience may always be a minority, but there's no indication that it's shrinking. And while the bigger labels go after 'crossovers' and other ephemera, smaller companies are always there to take up the slack." Close enough. One point.

The hell with them. The only reason they go to the opera house is because it's air-conditioned. (Yeah, I know, this is the sort of thing one says about a place like Tulsa, but then Tulsa actually has an opera company, and this gives me a chance to mention it while simultaneously sneering at the Europeans.)

"This may not be quite a Golden Age, but certainly its mettle is strong." One point for sheer syntactical hubris.

So on the Lynn scale, I score 3 out of 9, which disqualifies me from writing stuff like that — or like this Newsweek piece that I covered last month. Perhaps it's just as well.

Spiffiest quote from the Great North American Blackout, courtesy of Debbye Stratigacos:

There's a lot to be said for having your priorities in order.

I need hardly point out that tossing Gray Davis out of Sacramento, while certainly a boon, is only the tiniest of steps toward putting the Golden State's affairs in order. And if that last phrase sounds like California is on its deathbed, lacking only a few formalities before ringing down the curtain and joining the Choir Invisible, well, maybe it is. With half again as many people as any other state, a level of political and cultural fractiousness that would embarrass a middle-school class, and a tendency to regulate not only the things it can but also the things it can't — the timing belt in my car is supposed to be changed at 60,000 miles, unless I'm in California, in which case the Assembly has decreed that it will last until 105,000 — it may be time to put the California Republic out of its, and our, misery, by splitting it in two.

Or, suggests UPI's James C. Bennett, in three:

I don't really think we're going to see the states of Lodi, Moonbat and La Raza in my lifetime, but weirder things have happened, and there's already a Constitutional provision for the division of existing states, in Article IV, Section 3:

The Congress, I think, will look more kindly upon the idea of three states in place of California than they do upon the idea of one state in place of the District of Columbia, which admittedly isn't saying much. Selling it to the California Assembly will be much harder; just getting them to agree on the new borders will be a major accomplishment. Still, the state is almost forty billion dollars in the hole; what's the alternative? Foreclosure?

(Muchas gracias: Geitner Simmons.)

Touchingly lyrical, yet totally vulgar, this High Truth straight from Donnaville:

(If I had the slightest bit of sense, I'd kill comments on this item. Fat chance.)

For your love,
Oh, I would do anything,
I would do anything,
For your love.

Ed Townsend's "For Your Love" is one of the great R&B ballads of 1958, its simple lyric married to a spectacular orchestral (and choral, featuring the Blossoms) structure. Issued on Capitol 3926, it was a #7 R&B hit (#13 pop), though subsequent singles over the next three years failed to click.

Ed kept writing songs, though, and in 1963 he took over as the A&R man for Scepter/Wand in New York, replacing Luther Dixon. Theola Kilgore scored a 1963 hit with Ed's "The Love of My Man". "Foolish Fool", written and produced by Ed for Dee Dee Warwick in 1969, was nominated for a Grammy. In 1973, recovering from a bout with booze, Ed wrote "Let's Get It On", partly as a reminder to himself to get on with his life; once adopted by Marvin Gaye, it became an ode to sensuality that's still hard to beat thirty years later. Townsend's last big hit was "Finally Got Myself Together" for Curtis Mayfield and the Impressions.

Now Ed's gone; his heart finally gave out. He was 74. If you need me, I'll be at the record shelf.

I had heard Anne Garrels' All Things Considered report on the Iraqi response to the Northeast blackout Friday afternoon, and inasmuch as it had been a long day at the salt mine, I assumed that what I heard as smugness and snideness was just the effect of fatigue on my remaining brain cells, and thought no more about it. I mean, I'm sort of fond of Garrels: she's been through a hell of a lot as a Baghdad correspondent, and under the circumstances, a little bit of attitude is forgivable.

Well, I'm not the only one who picked up on smug and/or snide. At The Sound and Fury, LAN3 singled out this particular paragraph, matching the italics to Garrels' inflections:

Ain't it awful? This isn't quite as annoying as, say, Palestinians cheering after 9/11, but it does make me wish that I owned the patent on Schadenfreude; I could retire tomorrow without a care in the world.

I'd gotten away from "Weird Al" Yankovic for a while. Partly it was his erratic release schedule, but mostly, I think, it was the discouraging notion that pop hits these days are largely crap, and not even Weird Al-level parody can save them from their fecality.

Nova tossed me a copy of Poodle Hat. "You need to hear this," she insisted.

I took it home, shoved it into Drive H: and was promptly informed that I needed to upgrade QuickTime to at least 6.0. Nine point something megabytes later, I got to see the Enhanced features, including a genuine set of Yankovic family home movies with up-to-the-minute commentary. Good enough, I suppose, but isn't this what AL TV is for?

Finally, to the music. And yes, the hits, as expected, suffer from high crud levels, though Avril Lavigne's "Complicated" is handled beautifully. What you want here are the Al sort-of-originals, and Poodle Hat contains two of the best he's ever done: "Bob", a Dylanesque (circa "Subterranean Homesick Blues") number in which every single line is a palindrome, and "Genius in France", arguably the first successful Frank Zappa pastiche in recorded history, complete with bizarre changes in tempo, lyrics stuffed full of innuendo, odd noises masquerading as vocals, and serious guitar-hero riffing — some of which is contributed by FZ's son Dweezil, a serious guitar hero in his own right.

Then there's "Party at the Leper Colony", a spiffy update of "Willie and the Hand Jive" that...um, maybe I'd better leave it at that.

And, oh yes, there's a polka. Some things never change.

Once upon a time, an ill-fated Oklahoma City urban-renewal plan put downtown on two shifts — twelve hours business district, twelve hours mausoleum — and people wondered why. It's no secret, says Linda Stinnett of Oklahoma Main Street Center:

Simple as that. And in Oklahoma City, it's actually starting to happen; lofts have been carved out of buildings in Bricktown and along the downtown Automobile Alley, and more are coming. Lofts are in place in Norman and Cordell, and planned for other cities. The supply is coming because the demand is there, and because people have been willing to pay above-average rents for desirable locations. Were I twentysomething and on the party circuit, I probably wouldn't be able to resist the temptation myself.

Tiger would like you to know that it's possible to kick a marriage to death with a single pair of size-six Manolo Blahniks:

I'm not so sure that women are less choosy in this day and age; if they truly were less selective, surely they'd be lined up on my porch more than none deep.

More to the point, we all have romantic delusions, and one of the worst of them is expecting the other person to meet every conceivable emotional need we may have. We marry, and we think all of our troubles are over, all of our fears assuaged. In practice, this lasts about thirty-six hours at most.

Similarly, the woman who believes she can change a man will likely merely exchange him for another.

I've already figured that there isn't anyone for me, but this isn't because women have fluctuating levels of pickiness or because I'm some sort of "sex-crazed dog"; it's because marriage ultimately is a transaction, and I have very little of value to bring to the proceedings.

And if you approach the altar with more than the usual degree of trepidation, perhaps you might be better served by the Lewis Grizzard system: "I'll just find a woman I don't like and give her a house."

Somebody searched the Australian branch of Google for my life is a complete and utter failure.

I didn't mind getting the hit, really, but this is the only result for this search.

Public schools in Beaufort County, South Carolina, have implemented a new policy: first-semester grades must be on a scale from 62 to 100.

I thought at first this might be an homage to American Bandstand's Rate-A-Record, which scored current 45s on a scale from 35 to 98, but no, it's a self-esteem thing. Explains Deputy Superintendent Edna Crews:

Some hope that they can pass a class even if they screwed off for half a year? Why stop at 62? Why not just give them 100 right off the bat? Surely they'll feel even better about themselves when they get that automatic A.

(Via Fark)

We get another crummy C-60 ostensibly from Osama, and the world goes spastic once more.

Is it real? According to Venomous Kate, it may not matter:

Heracles, presented with exactly this task, called upon an ally: Iolaus, his charioteer, who stood off to the side with a torch. When Heracles lopped off a head, Iolaus was there to burn the stump to prevent regrowth. The last head, it is said, was immortal, so Heracles buried it beneath a boulder.

And just to prove that this ancient tale has contemporary resonance: Eurystheus, king of Mycenae, for whom Heracles had performed this task and nine others as ordered, refused to release Heracles from his bond: not only did Heracles actually get help with dealing with the Hydra, but he had tried to turn a profit on the cleaning of the Augean stables.

The beast can be — will be — killed. But don't expect to meet cost projections, or to garner more than perfunctory support, along the way.

Health-O-Meter, a leading manufacturer of bathroom scales (so to speak), has introduced a new product line which will record weights up to 400 lb.

With two-thirds of us overweight, at least according to the bean counters of the Nanny State and the minions of the insurance industry, who seem to think we all should look like Kate Moss after a long weekend, it was probably inevitable. The real need, I think, is for scales that read in stone, which, at least to non-British ears, might seem less accusative: "Twenty-eight stone? Doesn't sound so bad."

(Via Fark)

Alexandra at Out of Lascaux, on gender-related differences in writing:

I haven't, but Moshe Koppel, Bar-Ilan University in Israel, and Shlomo Argamon, Illinois Institute of Technology, apparently have. Their findings can now be tested in (more or less) realtime with Bookblog's Gender Genie.

I fed the Genie three items from this very blog, and it tagged two as male, one as female. A respectable batting average, though the algorithm claims an accuracy of 80 percent — and it does suggest that I probably should not try to pass myself off as a woman.

(Swiped from 601am)

This week, Outside the Beltway presents the Carnival of the Vanities, the first (and still the earliest) weekly roundup of the Best of the Blogs. James Joyner has chosen a football theme, and in keeping with same, I have submitted an entry which is listed under "Offensive Throwbacks".

Well, okay, it isn't really, but it could have been.

With the return of school comes the return of school zones, and a new season of one peculiar subset of left-lane bandits. You know the ones I mean: nailed for six over while they were in the school zone, they are now plodding along at six under, trying to create the illusion that they are morally upright, law-abiding citizens. The rest of the world quite properly views them, not as pillars of the community, but as mobile speed bumps.

What's worse, of course, is getting two of these twits in parallel on a four-lane, which is what happened this morning. The clod to the left, in a late-Seventies GM beater with the not-quite-completely-detached headliner whipping around the interior like a bullfighter's cape, finally got the message and pulled over to the right, but it took him miles to see the light. I'm sure he'll get some sort of commendation from the Anti-Destination League.

Susanna Cornett takes exception to an offhand description (on a History Channel program) of Indianapolis as "in the middle of the Bible Belt". Somebody, she concludes, is wearing his belt way too high:

But her objection is less to the geography than to the subtext:

I'm not so sure the producers were deliberately trying to be mean-spirited — I mean, if I really meant to be derogatory, I wouldn't confine myself to a single throwaway line — but I think she's right about this "monolithic entity" stuff. When I relocated to the West Coast in the late 80s, I encountered a surprisingly large number of people who, upon seeing my Oklahoma plates, were surprised that my teeth were my own and my résumé was readable.

And some of this does go in reverse: when I returned, this time with California credentials, some people wondered if I'd "gone Hollywood." Not a chance.

Speaking of Indiana, it presents some unusual problems for travelers on a schedule: of the state's 92 counties, only fifteen observe Daylight Saving Time, and some of them are in the Central time zone. (Most of Indiana is on Eastern Standard Time year-round.) A business/labor/trade alliance which spent a year and a half trying to persuade the state government to switch to DST has finally thrown in the towel; the General Assembly won't budge.

Not being keen on DST myself — you can't cut off one end of a rope and tie it to the other and expect it to be any longer when you're through — I doff my hat to those stubborn Hoosiers.

(Via Fark)

The New York Press has a funny (but not all that safe for work) reminiscence by Paul Krassner, founder (and, originally, entire staff) of The Realist, the Sixties Zeitgeist in magazine form. "Irreverence," said Krassner, "is our only sacred cow," and The Realist managed a sixteen-year cattle drive (1958-74) before running short of capitalist moolah. Krassner revived The Realist as a newsletter in 1985; it lasted, um, sixteen years.

I doubt the Press will get much traffic from this little blurb, but hear me out: if you think everything that's wrong with the world originated in the Sixties, you need to read this, just so you know whom to blame. For those of us who flirted with the counterculture — and as everyone knows, I'm a terrible flirt — it's just as essential.