And now, the recipe for Honey Pecan Ice Cream, the very recipe that won the blue ribbon at the Oklahoma State Fair this past month:

Winning recipe by Rosalie Seebeck, Bethany, Oklahoma.

And here's what she beat to get that blue ribbon.

The cop in the donut shop is perhaps as indelible an image of America as exists today.

But how about a cop on a donut shop?

Friday morning, 17 October, an Oklahoma City policeman will park himself on the roof of the Krispy Kreme shop at Pennsylvania and Memorial, and will remain there three days. Meanwhile, other members of the force will be on the grounds, collecting money for the state's Special Olympics. The scene will be duplicated at other Krispy Kreme locations in Oklahoma.

Hey, whatever works.

Poor Kelley, she's been some of the places I've been:

For sheer impulsiveness, I'm not in her league — boredom, maybe — but I've got no shortage of memories I might want to erase, and it's all due to, yes, doing silly stuff.

Lately, I've turned overcautious, the result of having been burned too many times flirting with the flames, and though I wouldn't have thought it possible a few (well, 15 or so) years ago, I seem to be embracing boredom. Maybe it's good for my blood pressure; it certainly doesn't do anything for my sense of — well, I can hardly call it adventure, can I?

It's got to be the control-freak side of me, always lurking in the background, finally assuming dominance. I don't like it much, but I've had so much Thou Shalt Not Be Vulnerable drilled into me over the years that I don't know if there's any possibility of shaking it off. And if there's one thing that's common to all control freaks, it's the fact that sooner or later, they're going to be out of control.

Life, said Damon Runyon, is six to five against: "just enough to keep it interesting." Maybe. Or maybe it's just this:

A federal judge has decided that there is insufficient evidence to demonstrate that the Washington Redskins disparage Native Americans, and therefore the trademark on their name remains valid, despite a move to revoke it.

I'm waiting for someone to file suit against the New York Giants, claiming that despite the name, they aren't in fact any taller than anyone else in the NFC East.

(Muchas gracias: Phillip Coons.)

What with my side careers in wholesale soft drinks and well thermometers going nowhere, it's probably time for me to get out of Cleveland once and for all.

No, I didn't know I was there either.

R. Scott Moxley, writing in the leftish Orange County Weekly, says that liberals should embrace the candidacy of Tom McClintock:

Issues of character aside, the biggest issue facing California isn't an item in McClintock's litany of standard social-conservative gripes; it's the financial bungling of Davis & Co. Precisely why, says Moxley, it's the perfect time for McClintock:

For those of us for whom it's more important to stop the patient's bleeding than to arrange for his facelift, this makes a fair amount of sense. And a successful McClintock term might actually sweep some of the moonbats in Sacramento out of their Assembly seats next time around.

(Via Matt Welch)

Traffic has been up substantially lately, and of course, it's not due to the scintillating quality of anything I've written; it's the incessant Googling for the video of "Stacy's Mom" by Fountains of Wayne, which was mentioned in passing here.

As of the last time I looked, I was #14 among 4990 hits, and since all the places that are actually streaming this video are ranked higher, I have to assume that the searchers are looking for a slightly-illicit non-streamed version to add to their collections.

In case this doesn't describe you, dear visitor, the pertinent official FoW/S-Curve Records site is here.

I reported here in June about a lawsuit filed against two Tulsa newspapers, one of which is defunct, which claimed that The Tulsa Tribune had published inflammatory material which incited the 1921 riot on Tulsa's largely-black north side.

The suit, filed by two survivors of the riot, has now been dropped; the plaintiffs gave no reason for requesting the dismissal.

Meanwhile, an unrelated suit filed in February against the state of Oklahoma and the city of Tulsa is pending in federal court, charging conspiracy to incite the riot.

No way am I going to argue with Wendy M.:

Maybe a title filter inside Movable Type: "Are you sure you want to use this description? It is already in use on [insert random number here] blogs." Or maybe weblogs.com can search for the string and refuse a ping from an offending blog.

This is too meta for me, I think.

A petition has been approved to initiate a grand jury investigation of Commissioner of Labor Brenda Reneau Wynn and Oklahoma County District Attorney Wes Lane; supporters of the investigation must now obtain 5000 signatures of residents to have the jury officially empaneled.

The petition charges that Reneau Wynn circumvented the state's competitive-bidding process, advised others how to get around the state's campaign laws, and conducted campaign affairs on state time. Lane is accused of taking a campaign contribution from Reneau Wynn under dubious circumstances, and of fudging evidence in the infamous Donald Pete case.

Wake Forest University is wondering what to do about Doctor Tom.

Doctor Tom wasn't a real doctor; he didn't even play one on TV. In fact, inasmuch as he died in 1927, he never saw a TV at all.

Tom Jeffries was the maintenance man for the Demon Deacons for forty years, and a plaque to his memory was raised by alumni in 1933. When the new Wake Forest campus was built, a replica of the plaque was created.

None of this would be controversial except that (1) Doctor Tom, as he was known to everyone, administration, faculty and students alike, was of African-American descent, and (2) some in the university community have decided that the plaque "is a daily insult to Mr. Jeffries and every other person of African descent who walks onto this campus," in the words of Rev. Carlson Eversley, an adjunct professor at Wake Forest's school of divinity.

What should the university do? Eversley wants the plaque amended to show Tom's last name and an explanation on another plaque of why and how the omission of same is dehumanizing, complete with references to the practice as it existed in the antebellum South. Oh, and an apology from the administration.

It is, of course, fascinating how unpleasant memories from the pre-Civil War era are so easily evoked in people who weren't born until a century afterwards.

(Via Tongue Tied)

The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers has ordered VeriSign to shut down its controversial (and, to some of us, incredibly stupid) SiteFinder facility. SiteFinder, which VeriSign designed to intercept requests for misspelled or otherwise defective .com and .net domains, has been accused of "breaking" various spam filters and other Internet systems.

VeriSign said they would comply with the ICANN request temporarily. Said VeriSign's Russell Lewis:

Inasmuch as SiteFinder must consult the VeriSign registry to be able to intercept requests for domains not registered, it's difficult to see how anyone can seriously consider the facility to be a "nonregistry" service.

If you, like me, suspected that Strain was capable of more than Sketches, here's a short story that he's going to leave posted for, he says, "24 hours or so."

You're done here anyway. Go read David. He's worth it.

For a while, anyway, it's just going to be Siegfried and, while Roy remains on the critical list after one of their famed white tigers turned on him during a performance.

It's a reminder that no matter how many precautions are taken beforehand, the art of illusion is very nearly as dangerous as it looks, and we probably wouldn't pay any attention to it if it didn't look dangerous. (The same is true of auto racing, only more so.) Still, that's not any kind of argument for abandoning the spectacle; it's just the way it is, and Roy knows this as well as anyone. He'll be back soon enough.

As an actual registered Democrat with a current subscription to Mother Jones — yes, really — I get regular mailings from the activist Left. One operation with which I was unfamiliar is Syracuse Cultural Workers, which bills itself as a "Peace and Justice Publisher Since 1982", and whose catalog arrived here yesterday.

Most of the contents were pretty predictable — T-shirts, posters, buttons, books like How Wal-Mart Is Destroying the World — but one particular poster caught my eye. It's called The Alternative Alphabet Poster For Little And Big People, it appears to be an SCW exclusive, and here's the pitch:

A is for Africa, B is for Bicycle, and so forth. Twenty-five of the twenty-six entries seem at least defensible, and they did come up with a reasonable X word (Xylem), but I'm puzzled by E: Echinacea?

KTOK, the dominant news/talk outlet in this part of the world, has finally figured out how to stream audio. (Okay, they hired a third party to do the scutwork. Not that there's anything wrong with that.)

You probably don't need this 24/7 — finding local outlets for Rush Limbaugh or Sean Hannity or even Glenn Beck is a fairly simple task, unless you live thirty thousand feet under Berkeley — but you'll definitely need it for First News with Cam Edwards. (In fact, given KTOK's incredibly-weird antenna pattern, some of us locals need the audio stream sometimes.)

In days of old when knights were bold and blogging not invented, people would speak of carrying coals to Newcastle, a task not exactly Sisyphean but not particularly useful, either, since Newcastle-upon-Tyne, at least at the time, was up to its presumably-dusty lungs in coal.

Were it not for its war-ravaged infrastructure, shipping oil to Iraq might be considered similarly useless, but until production resumes on something resembling a reasonable scale, petroleum will have to be imported, and Dick Cheney's old friends at Halliburton have drawn this assignment.

And forget about conservation measures: they're regarded with even more suspicion in Baghdad than they are in Amarillo. Cut-rate gas, courtesy of the Oil Ministry, is a tradition that Iraqis aren't anxious to give up. The Coalition Provisional Authority says, perhaps optimistically, that oil production in Iraq will reach three million barrels per day, close to pre-Gulf War levels, by next summer. In the meantime, you and I will contribute a few cents to somebody's Friday drive in the desert.

The world may not beat a pathway to your door, but you'll earn the gratitude of Dr. Weevil, and surely that's worth something.

By any reasonable estimation, this is one of the less-important outposts in blogdom, so no one is exactly champing at the bit to get onto my blogroll, which is notable for its high level of diversity and its low level of consistency. This is, I reckon, a Good Thing, since I don't have to write blistering articles about people clamoring to get in or sort-of-patient explanations of the rules of inclusion.

Still, self-referential navel-gazing is at the very heart (well, actually, somewhat below) of blogging, so I may as well reveal just how it is that people get on the left side (formerly the right side, and it may be again next time I redesign) of the front page.

There aren't any hard and fast rules, really. I do try to reciprocate when I catch an incoming link, but I always seem to be a couple of months behind in catching them, and besides, it's not like there's some Meta-Law of Symmetry governing blogroll links. Many of the sites listed, I was reading before I went to a daily blog format in the summer of '00; they're carried over from the old now-defunct separate links page. In general, if you're listed, it means only that I make a conscious effort to read your stuff once in a while; if not, it doesn't necessarily mean anything at all.

Exceedingly minor preference points are given to:

• Persons based in Oklahoma
  
• Persons I actually know
  (this overlaps slightly with the above)
  
• Persons of the female persuasion who are beautiful, smart, sarcastic and/or funny
  (2 out of 4 impresses; 3 out of 4 dazzles; 4 out of 4 means I'm in deep trouble)
  (this overlaps even more slightly with the above)
  

I have little faith in the power of email; so far, the main benefit it has brought me is the World's Smallest Instalanche™. This doesn't mean you shouldn't send me things; this does mean that you shouldn't expect anything from so doing.

Beyond that, all you really have to do is be more brilliant than I am — which shouldn't take much effort at all.

The Democratic Party of South Carolina has been experiencing financial problems of late, and party chairman Joe Erwin, a marketroid by trade, proposes to take up the slack by selling corporate sponsorships.

By imprinting campaign materials — even primary-election ballots — with corporate logos, Erwin hopes to cover the half-million-dollar cost of the Presidential primary next February. (In South Carolina, the parties pay for their own primaries; the state kicks in no funding.)

And it might even work. It seems to me that if, say, Charmin has no trouble showing a bear using its product in the woods, they shouldn't shy away from buying ad space on a reprint of the party platform.

Actually, it's probably not all in the title, but watching me muddle through in French is something I recommend only to the deeply sadistic among you.

Still, it's a great title for a blog: Mes amis, mes amours, mes emmerdes...

Covers all the bases, you might say. And besides, I'm predisposed to like anything that seems to be based on a song by Charles Aznavour.

The first Boobiethon was last year, and I ignored it, thinking it was silly. And maybe it was. Yet it raised over a thousand dollars for breast-cancer research — perhaps not an enormous sum considering all the work that needs to be done, but if you check any bucket, you'll realize that it's filled with individual drops.

So I resolved to pay attention to version 2.0 this year, and as of this morning donations were over four grand. Which, of course, begs the question: how many of those donations would have come in were the site not, um, busting out with photos?

Given what I've seen of the Blogathons and other charity projects, I think most of them probably would have come in anyway; bloggers, when they can afford to be, are a generous bunch. Still, the incentives provided may have tilted a few people into kicking in a few extra bucks, and the tantalizing prospect of hotter photos for higher donations....

I agonized over that for a few minutes while checking my PayPal balance, and in the end, it was Johnny Carson who made the decision for me. One evening, Dolly Parton, bless her, was on the show, and in the midst of something unrelated, Carson quipped, "I'd give a year's pay for a peek under there." Dolly laughed as only a Southern girl can, and I was reminded that there have been many times during my life when I've thought things like this, and the rest was easy.

But when someone organizes a similar benefit for prostate-cancer research — well, we'll cross that bridge when we come to it.

Just some of the things I read this weekend:

There otter be a law:
If you're thinking about bringing home Ring of Bright Water for the kids with the expectation that it will be sweet and innocuous — well, Surlybird suggests you think again.

Stealth linkage:
Rammer infers the existence of a new breed of popup ad that is launched when you click a link in the window in front of it, and blames lax IE security defaults for its proliferation.

Too sweet and innocent:
Donna remembers Donny Osmond fondly. Maybe too fondly.

Where have all the readers gone?
At Fresh Bilge, Alan ponders whether 'tis better to plug away at a single topic, to wander all over the place, or to aim Somewhere In Between.

Whizzing in the revenue stream:
Ravenwood reports on a Nashville man who was busted for flashing his lights to warn approaching traffic of a speed trap.

What are under the bridge?
"Why can't I get any intelligent trolls?" wonders Geoffrey.

This is not necessarily going to be a regular feature — at least, not one that's regularly scheduled.

In 1957, MGM's musicals unit remade the 1939 Ernst Lubitsch classic Ninotchka with a Cole Porter score. In Silk Stockings, directed by Rouben Mamoulian, Soviet composer Peter Ilyich Boroff (Wim Sonneveld) is hanging out in Paris with an American film producer (Fred Astaire), who plans to rework Boroff's socialistically-realistic Ode to a Tractor into a song for a Hollywood picture; the Kremlin dispatches three knuckleheads to retrieve Boroff from the the evil capitalists, and when the operatives, too, seem to have been seduced by the City of Lights, the deadly serious Nina Yoshenko — Cyd Charisse, with a Russian accent indistinguishable from her Scottish burr in Brigadoon, three years earlier, and who cares? — must salvage both the mission and the pride of the Soviet Union.

Boroff, once he heard the Hollywood version — with lyrics, yet! — was appalled, one reason why reworkings of these themes usually involve pieces by dead composers. (The other reason, very much related, is that if they've been dead long enough, the original work is out of copyright and therefore in the public domain.) The possibly-pseudonymous Ostin Allegro was no doubt aware of this when he put together Pop Meets the Classics, a guide to British hits (many also charting in North America) which draw from classical sources. Most of these I knew, and there are a couple which were not hits in the UK which I also know — one that comes to mind is "For Elise", a discofied Beethoven number played by "The Philharmonics" which occupied the bottom of Billboard's Hot 100 for one week in 1977 — but it's still startling to see how often composers of popular music have turned to the classics for themes, even today.

Scarily, I now have to track down a copy of S Club 7's "Natural", which, says Ostin, is based on Gabriel Fauré's Pavane, if only to see how it differs from the jazzy reworking of the same piece on Befour, a much-cherished (by me, anyway) early-Seventies album by Brian Auger and the Trinity.

The research company Perseus has gazed upon the face of the blogosphere, and likes it not much.

The Perseus report, as described in The Register, says that over 90 percent of bloggers are under thirty, and more than half are teenagers. Which means the typical blog — well, read it yourself:

On reflection, apart from the update schedule, this sounds rather more like my site than I'd care to admit.

Of 2.7 million blogs surveyed, one million had but a single post and then were presumably abandoned; the average blog is updated every two weeks.

I have to wonder, though: if Perseus actually looked at 2.7 million blogs, and one of those blogs was InstaPundit, which is updated approximately every 53.6 seconds, the vast majority of personal sites must be even worse than they report.

Of course, no report from Perseus is complete without commentary from Medusa, but that will have to wait.

(Update, 2 pm: A summary of the Perseus report is available here. It states up front that the blogs evaluated were all hosted by services specializing in same — specifically, Blog-City, BlogSpot, Diaryland, LiveJournal, Pitas, TypePad, Weblogger and Xanga — which means that no blog on its own domain was included in the survey. No wonder the results seem skewed. See also Xrlq's comments below.)

Just when you thought there couldn't possibly be any more last-minute revelations about the Running Man, Xrlq (pronounced "Xrlq") delivers the goods.

100000watts.com is reporting that WKXP radio in Kingston, New York has switched to an all-Christmas format.

The station recently had a call-letter change (it was previously WBPM), so this could be just a programming stunt in anticipation of a new format, but it's the first week of October, dammit.

(Update, 8 October, 8:40 pm: It was indeed a stunt.)

This Big Five Personality Test is currently making the rounds, and, well, how am I going to resist a deal like that?

The Big Five Personality Test

Extroverted	||||||||||	36%
Introverted	||||||||||||||||	64%
Friendly	||||||||||	40%
Aggressive	||||||||||||||	60%
Orderly	||||||||||||||||	70%
Disorderly	||||||	30%
Relaxed	||||	16%
Emotional	||||||||||||||||||||	84%
Intellectual	||||||||||||||||	70%
Practical	||||||	30%

Take Free Big 5 Personality Test

Now go away before I have a panic attack.

Lesley goes all Positively 4th Street on those males (we won't dignify them by calling them "men") who have given her the treatment recently attributed to Mr. Schwarzenegger:

Bottom line: She'd rather see you paralyzed.

VeriSign has issued a flurry of defenses of its temporarily-sidelined SiteFinder service, criticized in some quarters as being inimical to the proper operation of the Net.

While part of VeriSign's argument is technical — SiteFinder, they insist, has minimal impact on the rest of the Net — at the heart of the matter is not bits, but bucks:

So saith VeriSign senior VP Mark McLaughlin. And he doesn't stop there, either:

Which leads to the obvious question: Who should be pulling the strings, the techies or the money men? VeriSign obviously has decided on their answer.

Charles Austin may not be feeling well, but he can still squeeze off a barb with the best of them.

The polls close at 8 pm California time. What happens after that?

Count on it.

There have been rumors floating around, but today Senator Don Nickles made it official: his fourth term will be his last.

"Knowing when to leave," said Burt Bacharach and/or Hal David, "may be the smartest thing anyone can learn." Nickles is a smart fellow; I don't know what, if any, handwriting he may have seen on the wall, but I'm betting he's figured this one out to the last detail.

And now with a Senate seat opening up in 2004 — we're in for some bumpy times, folks.

Jonah Goldberg reports:

It could be worse. Given CNN's tendency to come up with hopelessly mangled captions, they might just as easily have tarred Arnold as a "Hitler Groping Serial Lover".

It is, of course, a foregone conclusion that should the Democrats not like the election results — and they won't — there will be delaying tactics not seen since the introduction of the shot clock. (Or, as McGehee puts it, the "flying monkeys have already descended on The Fugue State to try to keep Gray Davis in office as Governor for an additional three or four minutes.")

In anticipation of this event, Cold Fury has already ginned up a suitable poster, which you will undoubtedly see on sites full of FOG (Friends of Gray).

And probably uncredited, too.

It is a measure of something, surely, that in a 178-page issue of Harper's Bazaar — November '03, to be exact — an issue with both a feature on Meg Ryan and a pictorial with Gisele Bündchen, the only photograph that got more than perfunctory attention from me was a shot of Christine Todd Whitman.

Well, yes, she's expensively-dressed, but everyone in Bazaar is expensively-dressed; it's their raison d'être. So it's probably not the $2680 Carolina Herrera jacket/skirt combo or even the $1100 Salvatore Ferragamo pumps; what I'm seeing, I think, is a woman who is absolutely thrilled to have a private life again, and I do believe it shows.

Not that I have extensive experience observing women being thrilled, mind you.

Today the Department of Justice is seeking an injunction against Tulsa-based Rx Depot, a company used by thousands of consumers to import prescription drugs from Canada and elsewhere. Rx Depot's Oklahoma locations were closed by an earlier action; DOJ wants the remaining 77 stores in 26 states to shut down.

Inasmuch as the FDA does not inspect Canadian drugs, the DOJ's request is likely to rely heavily on safety concerns. Rx Depot counsel Fred Stoops scoffs: "It's not like we're buying these drugs from Afghanistan."

Even if the DOJ prevails, there will still be sources for Canadian drugs. Can the process be stopped at all? Robert Prather takes the long view:

The best possible outcome?

A push toward freer markets in those other countries? Certainly a boon, but probably not a likely prospect.

One of our language mavens — probably Edwin Newman, author of Strictly Speaking — once commented on the tendency of American news media to refer to Salvador Allende as the Marxist president of Chile: "You would almost think that 'Marxist President' had been the name of the office to which Allende had been elected."

Similar notions went through my head during NPR's Morning Edition today, about the third time Bob Edwards and friends described Arnold Schwarzenegger's new job as "Republican Governor of California."

The Hill (no relation) is reporting that Rep. Brad Carson, of Oklahoma's 2nd Congressional District, will seek the Senate seat to be vacated by Don Nickles, who has announced he will not run for a fifth term. Carson, a Democrat, is serving his second term in the House.

One likely Republican opponent, though he hasn't declared his candidacy yet, is Rep. Ernest Istook of the 5th District. Others reputedly waiting in the wings are Oklahoma City Mayor Kirk Humphreys, a Republican serving in a nonpartisan office, and Attorney General Drew Edmondson, a Democrat.

For the GOP, this means a change from a seat that was safe to a seat that is...um, less safe. Were I a Democratic party operative, I wouldn't be ordering any champagne just yet.

Well, apparently it was a stunt; WKXP radio in Kingston, New York has now booted the Christmas cheer in favor of a conventional country format. Call them "Kicks 94.3" — unless, of course, you were thinking of calling them something else entirely.

Shanti's got Carnival of the Vanities #55 at Dancing with Dogs, and you're welcome to partake of all the goodies therein.

Yes, even you, Sammy.

No way anyone will recall Oklahoma's governor, Brad Henry:

Mike from OkieDoke, from whom I pilfered this story, comments:

They'd have to hire someone just to follow Carroll Fisher around.

New slogan at news/talk KOMA:

More talk. No rock.

(Dear Cam: It was on a billboard. It's not like I was actually listening to them.)

Some lowlife shot up a convenience store on a strip of US 62 just outside the city limits, wounding the owner and killing his wife.

I don't think I'm going to miss this neighborhood at all.

Frank (not to be confused with Frank J. or Dr. Frank or TV's Frank) considers yours truly to be an activist.

Activist? Moi? Do I look opinionated? The color scheme of this blog is beige on beige, fercrissake.

On the other hand, I have to give the guy credit for pointing me towards the most gorgeous picture extant of Emmylou Harris.

Call it a wash. (You want hot wax, it's a dollar extra.)

Your health-insurance plan — even one as blinkered and philistine as CFI Care (not its real initials), which pays a smidgen of our medical bills at 42nd and Treadmill — will probably cover some measurable fraction of your expenses when you're suffering from a broken arm. It is less likely that they will cut a check when you're suffering from a broken heart. (If they actually did such things, I probably wouldn't have needed to spend an hour and a half importuning a loan officer this week; I could have bought a house out of pocket change.)

"But," says researcher Matthew Lieberman at UCLA, "the human brain sounds the same alarm system for emotional and physical distress." There may be no superficial resemblance between road rash and rejection, but the same two brain regions respond to both, and in very similar ways.

I'm not sure what the ultimate meaning of this may be, but I have noticed that I always have about a two-year supply of painkillers on the shelf. And that doesn't even include Jack Daniel's.

Vice President Dick Cheney is just now wrapping up his fundraiser at Civic Center Music Hall in Oklahoma City.

Now let's see: if Cheney sold out the place at $1000 a head — not at all unthinkable — that's $2.5 million before expenses.

Not a bad haul for a day's work, if I do say so myself.

On Day Two of the hearing in federal court in Tulsa, Judge Claire Eagan did not issue the injunction against Rx Depot requested by the Department of Justice, leaving the pharmaceutical importer free to operate through the end of the month. Judge Eagan said that on the 31st, she will receive supporting evidence from both DOJ and Rx Depot president Carl Moore.

The late Neil Postman was not a Luddite; while he decried the encroachment of technology, particularly media technology, he believed strongly in the ability of the human mind to deal with the sort of sensory overload which defined the last half-century or so.

Among observers of the media, Postman generally took second place behind Marshall McLuhan. But while McLuhan tended to stay on message (and therefore on the medium), Postman was all over the map. An educator by trade, his first shot across society's bow was Teaching as a Subversive Activity, written with frequent collaborator Charles Weingarten and published in 1969, a book which asks the ultimate question about education: "What's worth knowing?" (An excerpt is posted here.) The Disappearance of Childhood (1982) suggested that mass media were blurring the lines between children and adults, to the benefit of neither; Amusing Ourselves to Death (1985) blasted Hollywood for trivializing the human experience.

Former student Jay Rosen remembers Neil Postman in Salon this morning. It's worth some of your time.

Best of the Web (scroll down to the bottom of "The cognitive elite") is reprinting this paragraph found at DemocraticUnderground.com:

Says James Taranto at BoW of this:

What I find amusing is that these are generally the same sort of people who routinely castigate the GOP for its presumed lapses into voodoo economics. In their world, it's Lake Wobegon in reverse: most everyone is below average.

(Muchas gracias: Kimberly Swygert.)

From the Government Is Your Friend files, courtesy of South Africa's News24:

Disturbing visual: US Postmaster General John E. Potter giving himself a mock dope-slap and saying, "Why the hell didn't we think of that?"

You will, John, you will.

(Inspired by Jerry Scharf)

Actually, I don't know how many, if any, of the houses I'm supposed to look at today are going to be magnificent; in this price range, it's more realistic to expect, well, seven dwarfs.

Still, my needs are modest — never you mind about my desires — and almost anything is likely to be an improvement over what I have now.

Heigh-ho.

(Vent #360 has some backstory, if you're curious.)

From her perch in Toronto, Debbye's sized up the California results very well:

Of course, there are those who remain convinced that it was all part of an Evil GOP Scheme. For example:

If the Republicans had had any sense, they would have come up with someone other than Bill Simon, a right-wing Walter Mondale minus the charisma, to run against the Gray Eminence in 2002; they would never, ever have turned to the likes of the Terminator. The initial recall push was indeed the brainchild of an actual Republican, but nobody is arguing with a straight face that there weren't Democrats anxious to see Davis given the boot, and considering the sheer number of wicked plots attributed to the Republicans in recent years, it's amazing how few of them have actually worked: were the GOP truly in thrall to Satan, I'd be forced to conclude that the Prince of Darkness was way past his prime and should probably be replaced. Or recalled, even.

Now when you see recall movements catching fire in other places that have been run as badly as California — say, Zimbabwe — then you can start to think of it as a trend.

And they say chemotherapy sucks.

(Via Cruel Site of the Day)

One Hit Wonder Central would like to be your one-stop reference point for those musical acts who scored once on Billboard's Top 40 and were never heard from again. It's still under construction — most of the promised Artist Profiles aren't in place yet — but it's a reasonable sort of database, and there's a message board where inquiries can be posted. And, of course, I have a quibble or two: most egregiously, the Viscounts' version of "Harlem Nocturne" charted twice, in 1960 and in 1966, but the reissue made the Top 40 while the original didn't, so they've listed it as a 1966 song. Still, it definitely beats waiting around for me to get off my B-side to write a hundred or so new entries for Single File.

Well, The Expert and I started with a list of seven, but three were eliminated at the very beginning: under contract already or otherwise pulled from the market.

That leaves four, which we will cover in the order visited, followed by an Entertainment Weekly-style letter grade.

1. A cute little stone bungalow on a corner lot with a huge yard. Some newish amenities, lots of ceiling fans, and evidence of a fair amount of repainting over old paint. And whatever they'd painted the exterior stone with, it didn't stick worth a darn. C+

2. Modern, at least by Fifties standards, and about 30 percent larger than #1, and in a nicer neighborhood to boot. So why was it selling for only slightly more money? The Expert figured it out at once: basically, the entire block is sliding down the hill, a few centimeters at a time, and implementing the fixes would increase the price by half. There was also a general air of dinginess. D+

3. I should have known this 1941 frame house was wacky before I ever saw it; the MLS description contains the cryptic phrase "faux walls." Well, the walls looked genuine enough, but this was the first mock fireplace I'd ever seen that had been converted from a real fireplace. What's more, there was a single-car garage with two half-width doors, vertically hinged, which makes remote operation highly unlikely. Add to this an utterly gratuitous Florida room off the master bedroom, and porch steps the full width of the porch, and this place screams Insane Owner! at the top of its sixty-two-year-old lungs. Had it been about ten or twelve percent cheaper, I probably would have put in a bid. I may yet. A-

4. A noisy box in a quiet suburb, though the noise was due mostly to the people next door, who apparently were convinced that there was a special White Trash Edition of Architectural Digest coming out and they wanted to fix up their yard accordingly. Lots of clever space-utilization techniques to make the most of the smallish interior; The Expert, tipped off by a floor irregularity, spotted a couple of places where the foundation might be cracking or otherwise failing to behave itself. Otherwise, a solid B.

The search resumes once we get another fistful of prospects.

(Update, 10:15 pm: So that's a "faux wall.")

Well, actually, she's not, but she might be the most visible these days.

(Muchas gracias: Steph Mineart.)

The most expensive ZIP code, says Forbes, is not Beverly Hills 90210 or New York 10021; it's Jupiter Island, Florida 33455, where the median house price last year was a staggering $5.6 million, more than twice as high as second-place Aspen, Colorado 81611.

If you read this chart and feel dejected, come to Oklahoma City, where living in our toniest ZIP — 73116 — will set you back a modest $295,416.

Disclosure: While I once had a 90254 mailing address, I did not actually live in Hermosa Beach ($580,000).

(Via DiVERSiONZ)

Yes, I mean the Turtles recording, a massive Sixties hit (White Whale 244, 1967). It seemed perfectly obvious to me right off the bat that this wasn't your basic drippy love song, and a mere thirty-five years after the fact, I got around to blogging about it, thusly:

Why bring this up again? Because Alan Gordon is now on a mailing list to which I subscribe, and some kind soul beat me to the question of "What is this song really about?" And Mr Gordon responded with basically the same thing I told you in that second quoted paragraph, minus the snarkiness.

As coworkers will confirm, I derive way too much glee from vindication.

After a brief period of recreating a universe in her own image, Kelley is back for one last burst of Cul de Sac-tion before venturing into the Land of the Frequently Lei'd, and to tell you the truth, I still don't know how she finds all this stuff, or all the time it takes to write it up. Maybe it's a gift from the gods; maybe it's Maybelline. Perhaps we'll never know.

Marc Levin's You might be a leftist if... has gotten lots of play in blogdom, where the center often seems right of center.

The best comedy premises, of course, work just as well when you give them a quick 180-degree spin, and Aldahlia proves that she's very much up to the task.

And in the tradition of the fence-straddling centrist, I must report that there are items on both lists that sound something like me.

Robyn has posted the final totals for the 2003 Boobie-Thon, and they are awe-inspiring: $7045 from 169 donors, an average of $41.69 each, a heck of a lot of money considering how small and insignificant we're supposed to be down here in blogland. Pulling five digits next year should be a piece of cake.

Some of the photographs are awe-inspiring as well, but that's a different issue entirely.

Rep. Ernest Istook says he's not going to run for the Senate seat being vacated by Don Nickles next year.

Announcing he will seek reelection to his 5th District House seat, Istook cited the slight majorities held by the Republicans in Congress; he's not willing to risk the GOP House majority to take a shot at securing the Senate.

With J. C. Watts already having declined, this leaves the door open for Oklahoma City Mayor Kirk Humphreys, who has a press conference scheduled for this afternoon. (Should Humphreys win the seat, the City Council would appoint an acting mayor until a special election could be called; a city charter change is on the ballot tomorrow to allow a special election immediately.)

As for the Democrats, well, Brad Carson is definitely in, and Drew Edmondson is surely thinking about it.

Self-absorption, probably a key component of the successful blogger mindset, has its uses, but it tends to be more of a drawback when the screen is off and people are approached one at a time.

Then again, I was that way before I got a Web site, and I suppose I'm in reasonably good company.

Desiree Goodwin is a research assistant in the Harvard University library system; she's been there nine years, and she's still a research assistant because, she says, she's black and she's beautiful.

Neither the EEOC nor the Massachusetts Commission Against Discrimination has found sufficient reason to challenge Harvard with Goodwin's complaint, so she's filed suit against the university herself.

"White women wore sexy clothes, were outgoing, attractive and they were getting mentored and getting promoted, while I was being ignored and asked to work extra hours," Goodwin says. "I think it is racist because they feel threatened by the success of someone they don't feel is like them."

She approached her supervisor, and was allegedly told that "her skimpy clothing and zealous search for promotion" had made her a "joke among her...colleagues" and that she could easily get a job anywhere else.

I'm thinking there's something here we're not being told.

Meanwhile, I refuse to believe there has ever existed such a thing as an excessively-sexy librarian. And if you don't believe me, ask Professor Harold Hill (no relation).

(Via Fark)

(Update, 21 March 2005: More recent developments here.)

(Update, 4 April 2005: She's lost her case.)

(Update, 9 December 2005: This post says nothing new, but it has a picture; her LISNews.org interview is here.)

David Marcus of the San Jose Marital and Sexuality Centre has done the math:

This does not mean that 10:55 is okay and 11:05 is dangerous; what it does mean is that there is such a thing as a slippery slope, and porn serves as, shall we say, a lubricant for same.

A quote that jumped out at me:

And they probably liked it better than not being sucked at all — at least, at first.

(Muchas gracias: Susanna Cornett, who cheerfully wields the Fiskars™ on the article in question.)

I've driven on Massachusetts rotaries and New Jersey jughandles, and when I have, I've wondered, "Criminy, could they possibly make things any worse?"

Somehow, I managed to miss the Michigan Left.

(Via Altered Perceptions)

(Update, 8:30 pm, 14 October: The Webmaster of michiganhighways.org is grateful for the extra traffic, but he wonders about the hostility level. [You may need a Yahoo! account to read this.])

With Oklahoma City Mayor Kirk Humphreys on the brink of running for Don Nickles' Senate seat, candidates are positioning themselves for the top spot at City Hall.

Ward 1 Councilman and erstwhile media guy Mick Cornett is already in the ring with his own hat, and present-day media guy Cam Edwards says Cornett's a cinch to win a special election. (As noted yesterday, unless a city charter change is approved by voters, the position will be filled by the City Council upon Humphreys' resignation.)

Meanwhile, Senator Jim Inhofe announced that he would be more than happy to have Kirk Humphreys serve beside him in the Senate.

Can Hizzoner win it? I think he can, though there are plenty of people — plenty of Republicans, even — who can't stand him. The biggest problem, of course, is that he has no base outside the central part of the state, which the Inhofe endorsement presumably can help. But it's not going to be a walk, since the Democrats actually have candidates this time.

(Update, 15 October, 8 am: The charter change passed.)

A parent with a child in a Tulsa school got this explanation of what's going on in the classroom:

Um, yeah. Okay. Whatever you say.

Now what, exactly, does all this have to do with teaching French?

I can appreciate the idea of avoiding rote memorization, but in a foreign language for which total immersion is impracticable, there is really no choice but to learn all those irregular verbs and such.

Michael Bates, who brought this to light, comments:

Meanwhile, the school board, having been thwarted at every turn by the presence of trees, has rewritten the curriculum to avoid any mention of the forest.

"Theme for the year," indeed.

"I have never seen the middle class so stretched," said Senator Joseph Lieberman at a gathering at Fairview Baptist Church this morning. Unsurprisingly, he wants to jigger the tax brackets, preferably in a way that de-jiggers the Bush administration's changes over the past couple of years. I suspect the Senator's definition of "middle class" might be slightly different from yours or mine.

Dennis Kucinich is due in later today, and he too will probably say something about the beleaguered middle class.

Ah, the joys of an early primary.

(Update, 8:25 pm: Kucinich's pitch to us Average Folk involves dropping out of NAFTA and the WTO.)

Someone got to this site today searching for "sarah michelle gellar without dressing".

I dunno. Now, Alyson Hannigan with a simple vinaigrette....

Former Kentucky state senator John Doug Hays is under indictment for vote fraud; prosecutors wanted to try him in Frankfort, the state capital, rather than in Pikeville, near Hays' home, out of fear that they couldn't raise a proper (read "prone to convict") jury on the senator's home turf. A temporary compromise was reached, and the case was moved to London, Kentucky.

A defense motion to move the trial back to Pikeville was met with objections from the prosecution, citing worries about pre-trial publicity. And then US Attorney Kenneth R. Taylor unleashed this bombshell: after everyone with an opinion on the case had been disqualified, he said, "all that would remain to try the case would be illiterate cave dwellers."

Sheesh. It's National Brotherhood Week, fercryingoutloud.

(Suggested by Fark)

Bruce has a four-point plan for Brad Carson, 2nd District Congressman seeking to replace the retiring Don Nickles in the Senate, and it goes like this:

"You do these things," says Bruce, "and you can spit in the face of everybody you meet in Oklahoma and they'll still vote for you."

As an Oklahoma Democrat, I advise against item 1. :)

If you were an Evil Overlord, what would you do?

(Muchas gracias: Terkish Payne.)

The often-bombastic Robert Scheer opens with "Free Rush Limbaugh!" and explains why:

Why, indeed?

At least Scheer isn't calling for Limbaugh's head on a pike, unlike some on the left.

The 56th edition of Carnival of the Vanities is hosted by Priorities and Frivolities, and if ever two words summed up blogdom, those two do.

Our man Boomshock has put it all together for you, so get over there and read the good stuff.

Arnab Nandi isn't exactly a household name, but his handiwork is all over the Blogosphere™; it was Arnab who invented BlogSnob, the tiny text ad that gives you a random link to another blog.

Eventually, like so many such ventures, it got to be a full-time job and then some, and finally Arnab has decided to anoint a successor: Kalsey Consulting Group, which operates the TextAd exchange, will assume responsibility for BlogSnob.

I don't know how many new readers I got by way of BlogSnob; I do know that I discovered many new blogs from clicking on the random ads, and I'm grateful to Arnab for creating this little service and sticking with it long enough to make it work correctly.

We had three prospects for last night, but two of them evaporated — recession or no recession, houses are moving in these parts. However, today we had half a dozen more to play with, and we got to see five of the seven in what must be considered better-than-average time.

5. Small, vacant, simple, but executed well, and there's a not-as-rickety-as-it-looks deck out back. Backing out of the driveway is a trick, since there's a blind corner backed up with a hedge, but not what I'd call heinous. Docked a quarter-point for that godawful metal script passing for a house number; these things should have proper digits as Allah intended. Still rates a B+.

6. A few touches of whimsy here: proper digits, vertical, mounted on a block of wood covered with fabric; an added-on den (I assume) lined with knotty pine; slightly eccentric floor plan. Otherwise fairly ordinary, but kept up well, although the change from individual climate-control units to a central system has clearly been on an as-time-permits basis. A-

7. Huge, huge lot, demanding a John Deere to maintain it — and an empty storage building out back to keep one in. Decent interior, though I missed an actual step between the inside floor and the garage, 18 inches or so below. Very nice woodwork. B

8. Cute bungalow occupied by dog lover, maybe too cute. Gorgeous deck overlooking nicest backyard of the bunch. Floor plan leaves something to be desired, but exterior is nice and master-bedroom windows (on the corner of the house) strike me as brilliant. B

9. Tucked away in a neighborhood I'd never heard of, this is a smallish box with a big interior and 1¾ baths, something I hadn't seen yet. Nice kitchen. Exterior trim was actually being painted while we walked through. Good-sized backyard; neighbor's pecan tree will likely drop some freebies on this side of the fence. Slight cracking in the brickwork, though the slab looks solid. A-

Two more, plus anything else we catch between now and then, on Saturday.

Actually, 29 million of them for the quarter ending September, despite a couple of accounting charges. What's more, Apple's US retail stores, after a start which could charitably be characterized as slow, are now profitable.

Yeah, I know, I'm on one of those evil Wintel boxes. (Well, not precisely; my desktop at home has an AMD CPU, as did its three immediate predecessors.) But so long as the insanely great stuff starts on the Macintosh side of the aisle, it's clearly in my best interest to cheer Apple on.

The impudent finger, as the Romans called it. (Hint: it's not the thumb.) And, in Texas at least, it does not necessarily constitute a breach of the peace.

Two years ago, Robert Lee Coggin was trapped behind a member of the Anti-Destination League on US 183 in Lockhart. Annoyed at this obvious failure to observe Texas lane discipline, he tailgated the miscreant and flashed his lights. The perp, thinking the police were on his tail — Coggin's Chevy Caprice was, at one time, a police cruiser — duly pulled over, whereupon Coggin flew by and allegedly flipped him the bird. Hackles rose, police were called, and Coggin was charged with making an offensive gesture, drawing a $250 fine.

Coggin was sufficiently pissed off at this to try to get his conviction overturned, and the Texas Third Court of Appeals in Austin has now ruled in his favor.

I'm still not going to drive through Austin with a "Tuck Fexas" bumper sticker, though.

(Via Hit & Run)

(First such statement is here.)

Alan Farnham, writer for Forbes.com:

Last I heard, the death rate in this species was around 100 percent, and the only man reported to have beaten those odds — well, the extent of His sexual activity is not documented in detail.

Still, if there's something to this, my days (and my otherwise-empty nights) are obviously numbered.

And a side note to younger readers: That study was conducted among middle-aged men. Extrapolate at your own risk.

(Muchas gracias: The presumably-frustrated Combustible Boy.)

The Daily Oklahoman, through its NewsOK.com site (jointly operated with KWTV), has started a blog.

Robb Hibbard's obligatory quip-as-tagline ("Figures of speech & speech about figures"): pretty good.

The complete and utter lack of individual-item permalinks: pretty bad.

Oh, well. They'll learn. And it's not like a dearth of permalinks has hurt kausfiles. [Since when do you read kausfiles?-ed. Oh, shut up.]

If you thought that Diversity Seminar you attended in college was intended to touch people's hearts and change their minds, Surlypundit has ascertained otherwise:

Given the tendency of those "new rules" to extend the definition of "racism" as far as possible, it's hard to take these gatherings at all seriously; while racism clearly exists, and takes some truly heinous forms sometimes, the committee approach isn't, and likely never will be, anything resembling a solution. As wiser folk than I have said, the change has to come from within. For many, it has. For others, it will take longer.

Not to be confused with that other UPN, which is a standard capitalist outlet that is losing money faster than the Treasury can print it.

But the planned "liberal network" envisioned by the Left is widely expected to lose money just as fast, and without the benefit of Jake 2.0 or WWE Smackdown! either. UMLGuy, though, says that it really doesn't matter:

Well, at least it isn't Homeboys in Outer Space.

Of course, in the event of an actual Cubs-Red Sox World Series, you can expect a blast from Gabriel's trumpet halfway through the National Anthem.

For now, there's the Baseball Crank:

The only question left is how many of this year's Marlins will be with the same club next year.

The warning labels affixed to cigarette packs may have had little effect upon the actual number of smokers, but they've provided the raw material for probably thousands of parodies over the years, some of them actually amusing. One of my favorites turned up in the National Lampoon, back when they mattered; it was a warning label for prepackaged marijuana that read something like this: "Warning: The Attorney General Has Determined That Reeferette Smoking Is Hazardous To Your Ass."

I don't know if Acidman read that particular piece, but he definitely has the same sort of spirit.

Elijah, if you're wondering, is the son of Dan and Angi Lovejoy, Oklahoma bloggers, and the story of how he got here is the stuff of legend, with perhaps the occasional miracle.

If you want to read that story, it's not exactly organized into neat little segments, but this is a good place to start.

A fellow named Francis Carpenter, who works for a bank in Luxembourg, has evidently been drinking too much of the European Union's ersatz Kool-Aid.

In this piece in Le Figaro, Mr Carpenter proposes that British place names commemorating battles lost by the French — Waterloo, Trafalgar, and such — be changed, in the interest of furthering European unity.

This idea, fortunately, doesn't seem to be catching on in the UK, though no one seems to have responded officially with le mot de Cambronne.

(Via Fark)

American chef Anthony Bourdain apparently can eat almost anything, up to and including snake hearts and iguana, but he draws the line at Mickey D's.

Yep. The very thought of a McNugget strikes fear into the man. And it's not some Pamela Anderson-esque concern about what horrible things must happen to those poor birds to become McNuggets — it's hard to imagine that any chicken at all goes into those weird little discs — or anything like that. Bourdain's objections are rooted in ubiquity: American fast food is all over the globe, and therefore worthy of his contempt.

Tropiary (Friday, 7:57 pm) spins this attitude to its logical conclusion: What if some enterpreneurial types decided to make Bourdain's reptilian delights available to mass audiences?

"Hold the mayo, hold the venom, every sandwich wrapped in denim...."

No new listings since midweek, so The Expert and I had just two houses to check out this morning.

10. This place was a foreclosure, and it had been suggested in earlier discussions that despite what you see on those TV infomercials, there's not a lot of benefit to buying these things; apparently, once informed that they're about to be dispossessed, the occupants avenge themselves by trashing the premises. It was certainly the case here: non-functional appliances were scattered about, the window treatments were more trick than treat, and someone had made off with a couple of downspouts, fercrissake. This will be a beautiful home for someone someday — provided that someone is willing to spend half again the purchase price to restore its dignity. I'm not. C-

11. Located in one of the neighborhoods of which I dared not allow myself to dream, this house should have been a disaster: how else could I afford it? Well, it's small for the area, but it's up to the local level of spiffiness, all the major functions have been renovated to at least late-90s standards, and the floor plan is ingenious, once the mind accepts the idea of, say, an L-shaped bathroom. When the biggest gripe is "The cylinder in that deadbolt seems to be a little loose," it's time to sign the papers. A

And if they sign the papers, this is the last installment of "Househunting" you'll have to endure.

"The far right's dream judge."

That's what Ralph Neas of People for the American Way says about California Supreme Court Justice Janice Rogers Brown, nominated by President Bush to fill one of three vacancies on the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia. And being an African-American woman won't get Justice Brown a pass from the Congressional Black Caucus, either; DC House delegate Eleanor Holmes Norton complains that Brown is "cut from the same cloth as Clarence Thomas," and Rep. Barbara Lee (D-CA) claims that Brown suggested that "affirmative action resembled segregationist laws from the Jim Crow era."

Which, of course, is patently false. Under Jim Crow, the majority was empowered to make foolish decisions at the expense of minorities; under affirmative action, minorities are empowered to make foolish decisions at the expense of the majority. No resemblance whatsoever.

(With thanks to Jerry Scharf and John Rosenberg.)

By now, El Tigre has been at this long enough to be able to draw some conclusions, and of course he has:

This is true; when I see the seven-day average poking above 500 or so, I start wondering how much of a fall I'm going to take on a day like today when I'll be lucky to hit 350.

As the saying goes, if two people agree on everything, one of them is superfluous. And I don't worry about the occasional polite disagreement, even the occasional impolite disagreement; it's not like anyone is going to reach through the screen and thwap me upside the head.

I don't have unlimited bandwidth, but if I had a whole month of the busiest day I ever had, I wouldn't exceed the quantity I'm paying for. (This begs the question: "Why are you paying so much?" The answer: I bought this package on the basis of disk space, and even now, after three years of daily bloggage, said bloggage occupies only a small fraction of the total disk space used. There is a lot of non-blog material at this domain.)

I am reasonably certain that no one is interested in any of my 2000 parts.

Having never experienced a day when both activities took place, I don't think I'm ready to issue a comprehensive opinion on this subject.

A mere half an hour before the deadline, the deal foundered, and I said to myself, "Self, do I really want to lose out on this over one lousy percent of the purchase price?"

I didn't.

They sent me a counteroffer, and I sweetened the deal to the extent requested.

Unless I hear otherwise — and at this point I don't expect to, inasmuch as I have met their terms — I'm going to assume that said deal is done.

The small cohort of Everything American Sucks malingerers will of course groan, but I find considerable delight in discovering that tucked away in a corner of what used to be Saddam International Airport, there's now a Burger King.

Iraqis generally have yet to grasp the concept of using both hands to handle a Whopper, but for members of the Coalition of the Hungry who comprise the occupation force, the Baghdad BK is a veritable oasis: despite a menu more limited than what's offered in Peoria, catering to the troops has brought this location, in a mere six months, to the worldwide top ten in sales. You gotta love it. I can hardly wait to see what happens when fast food moves into the Fertile Crescent at high speed.

(Muchas gracias: Phillip Coons.)