Folks from 'round here will tell you that it always rains on the State Fair, and that something unpleasant will happen on Opening Night.

There's at least some truth to the former — the State Fair is scheduled in early fall, one of the wetter periods of the year — and maybe there's some to the latter as well, since Opening Night in Oklahoma City is 31 December, about the time Old Man Winter starts catching on to the fact that he's in charge again.

The rain doesn't keep people away from the Fair, though, and the downtown party that is Opening Night goes on even when the temperature is in single digits and the wind is howling from Hudson Bay and there's more ice on the sidewalks than in the drinks.

As a concept, Opening Night dates back to the Eighties, when the city and its culturemeisters observed that downtown tends to run down at sundown, and figured a New Year's Eve bash might draw some people out of the 'burbs for a change. Events were scheduled all over the place — you buy a button, you get admission to almost all of them at no extra charge — and eateries that normally closed when their business clientele went home stayed open late.

Despite spectacularly crappy weather in the early years, Opening Night did well, and when the Bricktown entertainment district began taking shape, Opening Night did even better. Forty thousand folks turned up last night and bought their buttons (six bucks); many more just came to party along the canal or in the streets. Times Square it ain't, but then we don't have to wonder if there's a picture of Dick Clark moldering away in a closet somewhere either.

Me? I came down with a bad case of the green-apple quick-step and retreated quickly. But thank you for asking.

Down in the comments on this item, we seem to be getting into a dust-up over who is, and who isn't, "privileged, pampered and powerful," to borrow Bruce's phrase. (And it's a damned fine phrase at that; I may have to use it for something one of these days.)

Taking these considerations in reverse order:

I don't feel especially powerful, and the gastric ailment that hit me yesterday doesn't help matters. I can get things done, sometimes.

Pampered? Maybe. As the saying goes, I can do without essentials, but I must have my luxuries. It must be noted, though, that both luxuries and essentials are acquired the old-fashioned way: I earned them.

As to the question of privilege: fifteen years ago, I was broke and living out of a thirteen-year-old car. It took some resources — some from friends and relatives, some from government — to put me back on something resembling a firm footing. I feel very much privileged, in that assistance was offered, that I was able to take advantage of what was offered me, and that eventually, I was able to resume a relatively-normal existence. Some people, faced with the same situation, would not feel privileged; they would want to know what the hell happened to their entitlements.

And some of those same people, I expect, would protest that these things were offered to me because I'm that very personification of evil, a white male. Given the fact that my mother was half Mexican and half Syrian, I'm not so white as I look, but that's not going to matter to these people: I am by definition one of the oppressors, and I get no credit for ethnicity because obviously at some point I sold out. There's only one possible response to that: "And I'm damn glad somebody was buying when I did." Indeed, it's a privilege.

Dear whoever (if anyone) is programming 96.9 "Bob" FM:

If you're going to run a feature on Big Hits of 1972, the inclusion of the Moody Blues' "Nights in White Satin", a track which was recorded in 1967 and which you play entirely too often anyway, is prima facie evidence that you don't have a farging clue.

Yes, I know: the single (Deram 85023; I have a copy) was a colossal flop on its initial release, and didn't become a Top Ten hit until, yes, 1972. But you didn't play the single; you played the entire 7:41 album track, from opening orchestral flourishes through "Breathe deep, the gathering gloom" all the way to the final gong, which you then segued into "Layla".

Which, by the way, came out in 1971, though I'm willing to let that slide. (The '71 single release was cut to 2:43; the '72 reissue ran the full seven minutes and odd; nobody ever plays the short version.)

I figure, any quiz that can draw both Venomous Kate and James Joyner demands my attention.

So: Are You A Blogaholic?

The average score at the moment I took this test was 42.9 out of 100; I scored, um, 64, which means:

Uh, what is this "social life" of which they speak?

Should anyone be curious, these are the names I have picked for the Amish Tech Support Dead Pool for 2004:

• Olivia de Havilland
  
• King Fahd
  
• Valery Giscard d'Estaing
  
• Michael Jackson
  
• Stephen King
  
• Frank Lautenberg
  
• Nelson Mandela
  
• Howard Metzenbaum
  
• Keith Richards
  
• Ariel Sharon
  
• Al Sharpton
  
• Edward Shevardnadze
  
• Sargent Shriver
  
• Anna Nicole Smith
  
• Boris Yeltsin
  

Last year, I scored for exactly one pick: David Brinkley.

The wisdom of Jay Solo:

Few of us are so fortunate, but a Good Thing it most assuredly is.

My congratulations to Jay and Deb. May they find every happiness along their way to eternity.

A question from Alan K. Henderson:

The short answer: well, it's between 38th and 39th. In Austin generally, the half-streets are used in preference to dubbing one of them "Place" or "Terrace", as is done up here in Oklahoma; the highest-numbered street in Austin, if I remember correctly, is 56½ Street.

If you exit west from I-35 at 38½ Street, eventually (west of Red River Street, I believe) you will be diverted onto 38th, which in turn mutates into 35th. Visitors are perplexed; so are residents.

Oklahoma sits over a huge reservoir of natural gas, there are dozens of oil rigs drilling in the state, and we even have coal mines. Still, we're going to deplete our fossil fuels eventually — the really cheap ones, anyway — so OG&E's Wind Power program, small as it is for now, justifies the amount of hype it's getting.

Of course, there's no way to guarantee that your little segment of the grid is going to be powered strictly by the Woodward turbine farm, and there's no way the utility can serve all of its customers with the 51-mW capacity available now. But if they can sell enough 100-kW units to individual customers to make a few bucks off the system — we're obviously never going to lack for wind in this state — there will be more turbines in the future, and presumably lower prices. And OG&E's nominal surcharge for wind power will largely be offset by a credit against the fuel-adjustment surcharge that's levied on the power they produce from gas or coal.

I did the math, or at least as much math as I could do based on two weeks' worth of billing at the new place, and I decided to buy six of the 100-kW units, which will cost me about $3.60 a month, save me about $2.35 in fuel adjustments at the current rate, and, says the utility, reduce emissions of Nasty Gases by four and a half tons.

It's hard to see any downside to this program. Granted, there are summer days in Oklahoma when the temperature is around 100 degrees and there isn't enough wind to motivate a tumbleweed, let alone spin a turbine, but my A/C doesn't care where the amps come from. And from my political point of view, it's still a boon: it's an environmental gesture that will actually accomplish something without a great deal of lifestyle adjustment, the Saudis don't make a dime off it, and if some passing bird is shredded over Woodward, it will annoy PETA. For a buck and a quarter a month, it's a hell of a deal.

Every year, Men's Fitness magazine rates the Top 25 Fit Cities and the Top 25 Fat Cities. Given our predilections here in the Okay City — cheap smokes, rib joints, a general dislike for the Nanny State — you'd probably expect us to be in the chub group, and you'd be right.

In fact, we're movin' on up; after the ignominy of finishing 23rd last year, we've made it up to 13th this time around. What's changed in the last twelve months? Well, I moved into the city, and...um...well, I suppose I can always question the methodology.

And after Detroit, which claims Numero Uno, four of the next five are in Texas, which surely is a sign of something.

Bruce talks about slapping a cap on damage awards in malpractice cases:

(Emphasis added.)

What we always hear about are the truly bizarre cases — Cam Edwards talked about one this week on his radio show, some woman who suffered burns after spilling her coffee and sued Starbucks — but using the man-bites-dog theory, I have to assume that these are the exception rather than the rule.

There are, indeed, too many lawsuits, and many of them are indeed frivolous; but the truly useless suits can be handled with a loser-pays system. And thinning out the docket is, I think, the most important "reform" that needs to take place.

The solution to high malpractice awards is simple: eliminate malpractice. The problem arises when you try to pin a workable definition onto the word, since medicine is at least as much art as it is science, and there's still a lot we don't know about everyday bodily functions. Sometimes all you can do is make an educated guess. I'd hate to think I could be sued for guessing wrong.

On the other hand, outside the medical realm, sometimes it's clear that bungling or malfeasance is at fault. Here's a comment from a page linked by Bruce, posted by Angry Bear, that cuts to the chase:

Actions, conservatives are fond of saying, have consequences, and indeed they do. There's no reason that corporate entities should be exempt from the consequences of their actions, or to have their liability artificially limited, when individual persons are granted no such exemptions. The argument is made that numerous damage awards can destroy a company; I suggest that if a firm has actually done something to justify numerous damage awards, it may well deserve to be destroyed.

There's a new weekly newspaper in town, and "in town" is the operative phrase.

The MidCity Advocate, published Thursdays, is your standard suburban community news/shopper with a twist: it's aimed, not at the suburbs, but at those of us who live in the 25 square miles of the central city. (Their coverage area runs from Portland to Kelley, Reno to 63rd.) This makes a certain amount of sense, since almost every other part of town is covered by a similar publication.

One pitch made by the Advocate is the diversity of its readership: "The MidCity area has over 65,000 residents that span the socio-economic spectrum. There is a broad mix of income levels, ethnic diversity and education." No doubt about that. The National Register of Historic Places records fifteen districts in the county, and twelve of them are in this area; there are also, alas, some neighborhoods which can charitably be described as "rough". Still, what's true of the 'burbs is also true here in the city: most of us are here because this is where we want to be.

I don't recognize any of the names on the masthead; evidently this is an entirely new bunch of folks. Sports Editor Jerry Spaeder admits to having roots in some place like Erie, Pennsylvania. I'm sort of hoping that the Advocate staff is here because this is where they want to be.

Jessie Rosenberg, home from college for what used to be called the Christmas break, explains why it would be a waste of time to hold one of those affirmative-action bake sales at Bryn Mawr:

This is not the situation for which Elvis Costello wrote, "I used to be disgusted / And now I try to be amused." But it fits.

The Dallas Morning News has selected George W. Bush as the Texan of the Year, which probably isn't that much of a surprise.

There was some wailing and gnashing of teeth, to be sure — the paper's blog printed a couple of reader comments that, shall we say, took exception to the selection — but it's hard to argue with the conclusion of the announcement, written by Rod Dreher:

And Keven Ann Willey, editorial-page editor, noted that some of the disagreements stemmed from the fact that, well, Bush wasn't born in Texas. (Before you ask: New Haven, Connecticut.) Not that this matters:

The Oklahoman has yet to announce an Oklahoman of the Year, though KTOK's Cam Edwards ran a phone poll last week, in which General Tommy Franks (who, incidentally, was born in Texas) was rather convincingly beating out OU quarterback and Heisman Trophy winner Jason White before the combination of my morning commute and the station's weird directional pattern dropped the program out of earshot.

The newspaper blog is no longer a novelty. This does not necessarily portend a massive rush to commercially-operated blogs: some businesses don't really lend themselves to bloggage. (Of course, if someone does come up with, say, martysshellstation.com, please send me a link.)

There are, however, quite a few real-estate blogs. Which makes sense, in a way; while most of us do business with them fairly rarely, the business that we do is immensely complicated and incredibly expensive, so to the extent that they're reaching out to us, they're doing us something of a favor by assisting us with our research. Of course, this is just icing on the commercial cake — the motivation, first and foremost, is to build their own businesses — but I'll happily take any crumbs I'm thrown that will help me with my side of the deal.

(Inspired by The Great Team, an agency in the O.C. that both sells houses and blogs, and which admits to having read this assortment of screeds at least once.)

Sinclair Broadcast Group's News Central concept has been controversial from the beginning; in fact, last summer Sinclair's VP/General Counsel Barry Faber found himself defending the operation [requires Adobe Reader] before the presumably-skeptical Senate Commerce Committee.

Well, I'd like to think I'm at least as skeptical as a Senator, so I figured the least I could do was to check out a News Central broadcast, which I did last night at 9 pm on Sinclair's KOKH-TV, the Fox affiliate in Oklahoma City.

My most immediate reaction, actually, was marveling at the ingenuity of it all: the KOKH-TV news set is essentially identical to Sinclair's News Central set in Baltimore County, Maryland, and although you never see the local anchor and the News Central anchor sitting together trading quips — given the amount of this that goes on at other local stations, I'm inclined to think this is an improvement — it's never blatantly obvious that the newscast is pasted together from separate segments. (Take away 16 minutes from the hour for commercials, and the balance between national and local segments seems to be split about 3-2.)

I have some concerns, most about weather: for instance, is the guy from AccuWeather, which provides the lion's share of News Central weather reportage, going to know about sudden storms out here in Tornado Alley fast enough to issue the appropriate warnings? Then again, none of the three big radio groups in town have any weather facilities of their own — they rely on the local TV stations to provide their forecasts and updates — so I have to assume that News Central has given the matter some thought, and next time we have spectacularly crappy weather (right now, it's merely cold), I will check.

Then there's The Point, the commentary by Sinclair's VP/corporate relations Mark Hyman. Hyman leans decidedly right, which doesn't bother me; however, he has that patented Fox News snarkier-than-thou smirk, which does. (Note to television executives: If you're gonna rip off the Fox News Channel, rip off its most appealing feature: news babes in outfits that seem scantier than they really are.) I'm not sure how well this will play in markets less conservative than Oklahoma City, which is, well, almost all of them.

Local news, as the estimable Laurence Simon reminds us, is intended as a profit center; any public-service considerations are secondary. Obviously Sinclair hopes to make its local newscasts profitable, and this is the path they've chosen. People with impeccable journalistic credentials will look at it and recoil in horror: "They've taken away the local angle!" I'm not so sure. If the "local angle" demands that three minutes be spent on interviewing the neighbor of someone who was shot by the cops — which happened last night on some other station — I'm happy to see it taken away.

I haven't submitted anything to the BlogMadness competition, on the basis that my below-average material sucks, and my above-average material...um, sucks less.

Then again, few authors (if I may borrow the term for a moment) are the best judges of their own work, so if you happen to think that something I posted in 2003 was worthwhile, leave a comment here or in email, and if there should be anything resembling a consensus between now and the 20th, I will duly submit the recommended piece.

I have almost always been puzzled as to the reason why perfectly desirable women would willingly embrace the term "spinster," a word which to me has always seemed fraught with despair and desolation and all those other D words I used to toss around so frequently.

After reading this, perhaps I understand a little better. I'm reasonably certain that not everyone using the term subscribes to every single item in the list, but I think they might buy this line:

Heh. She said "offshoot."

Now maybe I should look for a comparable term for myself — besides "dork," of course.

Somebody at the editing console at WFAA-TV in Dallas — well, no, that's wrong, because apparently there wasn't anybody editing that day.

You'll need Windows Media Player to see the actual video clip.

(Via Cruel Site of the Day)

One bomb burst of the bizarre this morning. NPR's Diane Rehm Show scheduled a program about the economic outlook, and Paul Krugman (Princeton professor and columnist for The New York Times) and Grover Norquist (head of Americans for Tax Reform) were booked; Krugman apparently said that he would not appear alongside Norquist.

So Diane did the first half of the hour with Krugman, the second half with Norquist, and I'm wondering: have these guys been feuding lately? Krugman has occasionally sniped at Norquist, but I'm surprised things have gotten to such a state.

Neighborhood Association meeting tonight, and a better turnout than last month, but "It's only a block or so, I'll walk" makes a lot more sense when the temperature is above freezing, something it hasn't been since midday Sunday and probably won't be again until Wednesday noon.

Normally, if I write something, it's here, though over the years I have contributed a few product reviews to Epinions.com — around $100 worth, in fact — and scattered occasional comments on automotive message boards.

Late last year, I was watching a DVD of a small indie film and for reasons unknown was motivated to write down my reaction and submit it to the Internet Movie Database. There is a backlog of submissions from amateur reviewers, so it's only just now that they've gotten around to mine; if you're at all curious as to how I'd respond to a "dark comedy of word games, sex, fantasy and Pop-Tarts," you're invited to visit the IMDb page for the 1999 film The Invisibles — not at all related to Grant Morrison's comic series — and stare in disbelief.

Michael Bates, a couple of weeks ago, decried a plan by the University of Tulsa to, in his words, "replace another Route 66 landmark with empty space." The University's favored tool is the power of eminent domain, as wielded by the City of Tulsa on the school's behalf:

Meanwhile, there's an effort in Colorado to curb this sort of thing. A bill being introduced into the Colorado legislature this week by Rep. Shawn Mitchell (R-Broomfield) would bar the use of eminent domain for private projects:

The Colorado Municipal League [link requires Adobe Reader], for its part, "opposes state and federal actions interfering with municipal authority concerning land use regulations." Of course they do.

Judge James Alexander had had it up to here with people appearing before the Oakland County (Michigan) Circuit Court in garb more suitable for putting up drywall. The court now has a dress code and some stricter rules of conduct, and violators may be sent home or worse.

This action hasn't built any excitement in Pontiac just yet — so far, Judge Alexander has sent just one person home to change — but things should get interesting as temperatures rise and quantities of clothing diminish.

(Via Dawn at Altered Perceptions)

Well, it was 7 degrees Fahrenheit this morning, the coldest it's been since 3 March 2002.

I bitched about it then, too.

They promised us 40s tomorrow. Then again, they promised us 30s Monday and Tuesday, and we didn't get those either.

VibeOK, the section of NewsOK.com that's aimed at young, happenin' kids (pardon me while I hurl), is asking, in the wake of the latest Britney Spears debacle: "If you could marry a pop star for 55 hours, who would it be?"

A dozen choices (six male, six female) are offered, none of them especially inspiring, but if I had two days and change, I suppose the least annoying of the bunch would be Beyoncé Knowles, who is easy on the eyes and generally not known as a pain in the neck.

On the other hand, I could think of a dozen bloggers more worthy of my time, though I am no more likely to win their hearts than Beyoncé's.

The first Carnival of the Vanities for 2004 is hosted by American Realpolitik. This 68th edition continues the tradition of bringing you the best of the blogs for the past week, and even though I have an item in there this week, don't let that stop you from reading.

Last Minute Network Ltd, a British online travel vendor, managed to irritate some Web surfers with some pseudo-King James pitches; said surfers complained to the UK's Advertising Standards Association. A sample:

Not funny, especially, and, saith the ASA, not offensive, particularly. Which makes sense, I suppose: everyone talked like that in 1611.

For those who are accustomed to thinking of Donald Rumsfeld as an egomaniac, your reality check is in the mail.

The Hill (no relation) is reporting that the SecDef had been Time's first choice for Person of the Year 2003, but he had other ideas; in November, when Time editors met with Rumsfeld at the Pentagon to talk war plans, the Secretary suggested, out of the blue, that the American soldier ought to be the magazine's choice for POTY.

Did Rumsfeld suspect something? Was he just trying to spread a meme? It's probably impossible to know for sure, but surely this is not the act of a man with a serious lust for headlines.

(Via Outside the Beltway)

There is a fair amount of dissatisfaction with the proposal for the World Trade Center Memorial, and Michele points to an example of How To Do It Right.

In my back yard, more or less.

Last year, the day before 9/11, I found myself at the Fence, where hundreds of small items left by visitors pay silent tribute to the victims of April 19. It is a genuinely moving place, perhaps the most heartbreaking (because it's the simplest) part of the Oklahoma City National Memorial, and if it should inspire someone working on the WTC project, so much the better.

But I remember when I heard the bomb go off at 9:02, and while I'm always pleased to see my hometown recognized for providing a good example, I feel compelled to point out that the Fence, like the rest of the Memorial, is not for us; it's for the 168 friends and neighbors who were taken away in that frightening collision of madness and evil. The WTC planners would do well to remember that their first job is to honor the victims of 9/11, not to produce, as Michele says, "a piece of concept art."

If you show up at U-Haul with a Ford Explorer, you will leave without the trailer you were planning to tow; The Detroit News is reporting that U-Haul International has forbidden its 17,000 local outlets to rent trailers to Explorer owners, citing ongoing lawsuits involving America's largest-selling sport-utility vehicle.

The ban applies to all model years, despite the fact that most of the litigation, including the Firestone debacle, involved the previous generation of the Explorer; Ford redesigned the truck for 2003 with an independent rear suspension, which enhances handling and lowers the center of gravity.

Curiously, the Mercury Mountaineer, which is basically the Explorer with a brushed-aluminum interior and the top-line powertrain, is not included in the ban.

Okay, 'fess up: How many of you were playing wait-and-see with Wesley Clark, holding off until he got an endorsement from Madonna?

Yeah, that's what I thought.

The Federal Communications Commission has called AT&T Wireless on the carpet for falling down on number portability; the Death Star, meanwhile, is telling customers that there may be as much as a five-day delay in moving numbers between cell carriers.

When it doesn't take six weeks, that is.

We got merchandise, by gum.

Arriving through the slender slot in the door: Bigwig's ingenious campaign sticker, telling the world what he (and I) think of the Democrats' favorite son of 1972 2004.

And stuffed under the welcome mat, to the extent that a ten-inch cube can be stuffed under anything flat: Brother Dave's Better Living Through Blogging mug, in the charmingly-retro distaff version.

I feel indescribably rich, in a budget-minded sort of way.

One of those talk-show guys is fond of saying, "If you have a home, you have home repairs." This is, of course, not something I want to think about, but if I'm to avoid being at the mercy of some guy in a battered pickup truck, I need to be able to do some of the simpler tasks myself.

Problem: Extremely loose toilet handle — requires jiggling in any position and for any function.

Solution: Replace handle/actuator lever. (Float valve was judged to be working correctly.)

Tool used: Vise-Grip™, to remove old (and somewhat grungy) apparatus.

Time to fix: 6 minutes, not counting trip to Home Depot.

Cost: $4.28.

I feel better already. Okay, this isn't exactly retrieving the Beagle 2, but frankly, I'd rather not face something incredibly serious just yet.

That's what Wesley Clark's campaign people are saying, citing a new poll in Oklahoma that shows the general trailing Democratic frontrunner Howard Dean by a mere three percentage points, within the predicted margin of error. (Joe Lieberman is a distant third; the others don't matter.)

The Oklahoma primary is 3 February. I've scheduled a dental appointment for that date in anticipation. Registration closes this afternoon.

Happy 60th (!) birthday, Jimmy Page.

Baldilocks reads the terms of the Official Salads Act:

Thousand Island has always struck me as overwrought, though it's difficult to find variations in the range of, say, 350 to 600 Island.

Other than that, I think I'd be fortunate to score higher than a D-plus on this admittedly strict set of requirements. And that's a shame, because:

Mental note: This is probably not the ideal day to hit the drive-thru at Whataburger.

NEW ROME, OH (WATSO*): Democratic Presidential candidate Dennis Kucinich today lashed out at the Bush administration's space-exploration proposals, calling them "ill-advised" and "unnecessarily bellicose."

"The very idea of going to Mars," said the former Ohio Congressman, "encapsulates everything that's wrong with George Bush. In the first place, it's a red planet. This is yet another example of the Bush administration's schemes to reward its friends and punish its enemies. There is no evidence that Karl Rove, or any of Bush's advisers, made the slightest effort to locate a blue planet for exploration."

Another problem, said Kucinich, is the nature of Mars itself. "It's the planet of war. How many times must we go through this? War, war, war. It's the only thing George Bush knows."

The Kucinich campaign has yet to release formally any alternative plan for space exploration, but the candidate hinted at some of the ideas he'd like to see in such a plan. "We're looking towards Venus, which is, after all, a planet of women, who have been cruelly underrepresented in the space program up to now, and then, perhaps in our second term, Vulcan, where war and hatred have been replaced by reason and logic. As Americans, we deserve no less."

*With apologies to Scott Ott

First city utility bill has arrived, and it's a monster: $135.71, though about $76 of it seems to be refundable deposits of various sorts, and there's $20 for a service initiation fee. This suggests that until Heavy Lawn Watering begins, I'm looking at $40ish water/garbage/sewage bills every month, which isn't exactly horrendous.

Once I recovered my composure, I noticed something marked "Drainage Fee — Fee Due To Unfunded EPA Mandate." Needless to say, I had to track this down, and here's the scoop:

Of course, "unfunded mandate," if you say it loudly enough, becomes a buzzword. And it's said quite a bit, now that the Feds seem comfortable with handing out regulations without regard to cost. Still, absent evidence to the contrary, I am going to assume that this particular mandate is something that needs to be, or at least ought to be, done, and will pay my $3.82 (up from $2.73, unless this is prorated in some strange manner) with a smile and only slightly clenched teeth.

Rod Dreher, on The Dallas Morning News blog (scroll down to 9 January, 4:49 pm), sees some inconsistencies in Howard Dean's sudden spirituality:

There are times when I suspect the only book of Scripture Dr. Dean has read is Numbers.

Alfred Pugh has died in Bay Pines, Florida. According to the Veterans Administration, he was the oldest American veteran who had been wounded in combat.

Pugh, who spoke both French and English, served in World War I as an infantryman who doubled as interpreter, and was taken out by a mustard-gas blast in the Argonne. "We didn't get gas masks," he said, "until the day after it happened." The French subsequently elected him to the Légion d'Honneur with rank of Chevalier.

The VA says about three hundred American WWI veterans are still alive.

Al Pugh survived the mustard gas, but it was something else that got to his lungs that killed him: pneumonia. He was a week and a half short of his 109th birthday.

I thank him, as I thank all our troops.

Jennifer Alfano, in the February Harper's Bazaar:

Quite apart from the fact that twenty-three K would make a huge hole in my mountain of debt, this is a fairly startling number, if only because I don't think I've spent that much on all items of clothing combined in the thirty-two years I've had to buy my own.

Then again, sixteen pages away in the same issue, "Shoes of the Season" features six pair one supposedly must have, and having them will cost a total of $3510. What's worse, none of them, at least to my eyes, seem all that compelling; the best of the bunch, a rounded-throat pump from Prada, earns that status merely by having no blatantly hideous faults. (Manolo Blahnik is conspicuous in this group by his absence, and I didn't see any flip-flops, from Hermès or anyone else.)

This is, I suppose, one of those things I'm not supposed to understand, like the item I found today in the supermarket labeled "Free Range Chicken Broth". How the hell did they get it into the can?

And this time, you get to see the, um, inner workings, because it doesn't do the math for you.

Ready?

Which Democratic primary candidate are you — in bed?

(Not suitable for all ages or workplaces; via Doc Searls.)

What's that? Oh, me? I'm an intriguing (or possibly nauseating) mix of Joe Lieberman and Carol Moseley-Braun.

Aldahlia says she's "an honest to God movie snob of massive proportions," and maybe it's true:

Having once castigated a radio station for playing a hacked-together edit of Tommy James' "Crimson and Clover" instead of the proper single version or even (heaven help us) that absurd quasi-psychedelic LP mix, I suspect I am in no position to grumble here. And besides, if everything (and everyone) were perfect, we'd be bored out of our skulls.

With an assist from Dawn Eden, I have learned that Rhino's Handmade division has reissued the two albums by the late Judee Sill, the first of which has been a valued part of my collection for over thirty years.

Judee Sill was the very first LP issued under David Geffen's Asylum imprint, then distributed by Atlantic. Her earlier songs listed a copyright by Blimp Music, the Turtles' publishing unit; indeed, the Turtles had cut a version of her "Lady-O" in late 1969, which charted at #78. But nothing here is truly Flo-and-Eddie-esque; Sill's songs are sort of what you might get if you replaced Joni Mitchell's frustrated eroticism (see For the Roses, Mitchell's first release for Asylum) with a spirituality that's part Sixties cosmic, part traditional Christian, and if that seems perhaps contradictory, here's the chorus of "My Man on Love":

Most of the songs center on Sill's voice and guitar, but "Jesus Was a Cross Maker", the intended single (and produced, unlike the rest of the LP, by Graham Nash), borrows the gospel-piano style to stirring effect. It did not chart, and the album was a relative stiff; two years later, Heart Food went largely unnoticed.

A friend of hers once quoted Judee Sill as saying that she would become famous and die before she was forty. She made it to thirty-five before the drugs took their toll; "famous," of course, is open to discussion. Certainly she's remembered here and there, and I'm not above dropping her name when the circumstances permit. (And, of course, I'm grateful to Dawn for providing some circumstances.)

Ravenwood reports that Cleveland's daily newspaper isn't taking Ohio's new concealed-carry law lightly: The Plain Dealer plans to print the names of all Ohioans receiving permits under the new law.

Once they do, vow the operators of the Web site Keep and Bear Arms, they will print the names of all Ohioans who work for The Plain Dealer. Ravenwood, in the spirit of this response, has opened the volley with the details on the newspaper's editor, who lives in one of those spiffy neighborhoods practically right on the lake.

Meanwhile, The Columbus Dispatch is very unhappy that the state won't be releasing the names of permit-holders to the general public; of course, what really disturbs the Dispatch is that permits will be issued in the first place.

Most state concealed-carry laws are what is called "shall-issue" laws; that is, it is not left to the discretion of local authorities to decide whether to issue a permit. Unless there is some specific legal reason to disqualify an applicant, his permit is to be approved. Most states, including Ohio once their law goes into effect in April, do have prerequisites which must be met, but in a shall-issue state, if those prerequisites are met, the permit is issued, and that's that.

This fact itself annoys a lot of people, among them the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence, which annually hands out usually-failing report cards to the individual states and this year gave Oklahoma a D-minus [link requires Adobe Reader] for, among other things, having a "shall-issue" law. Only they put it this way:

Imagine that. Police are forced to let people carry guns. "Why, when I was younger, the police didn't have to let you do a damn thing; they could pull you over for any reason they wanted, and we liked it." Yeah, sure.

When the grandchildren ask me "What made you join the National Rifle Association, anyway?" I'll give them that White Album nonsense about being the all-American bullet-headed Saxon mother's son, and then I'll probably just let them read this post.

(Update, 13 January, 1:15 pm: Xrlq [20 points in Scrabble®] disposes of the Dispatch.)

Last time I was in Oklahoma City's Full Circle Bookstore, I spent rather a lot of the time swapping stories with an old friend.

Now that I've moved into the middle of town, the store is only a mile from me, so I figured the least I could do was reacquaint myself with its combination of virtues and quirks (it's the last independent bookseller in the state with anything resembling an extensive inventory; the books are shelved literally up to the ceiling, which means either eyestrain or summoning a staff member more often than you would in one of the chains; its owner is running for Mayor).

This afternoon, I did have to have one book procured for me, though this was due to my failure to comprehend the filing system — who would have thought that a personal memoir might be filed under "Biography"? — and I spent rather a lot of the time swapping stories with an old friend.

Kurt "Captain And" Lochner, like me (and like author Brian A. Hopkins and occasional reader/commenter/philosopher W. Terkish Payne) a member of the old Lair Security, Inc. BBS Überclique back in the day, caught me just south of the north entrance. Neither one of us believed it at first. We traded information on where the others had gone — unsurprisingly, he'd kept closer tabs than had I — and made fun of losers. It was quite an experience, especially since both of us seemed to look better than we used to. (Take that, entropy!)

Now I wonder who will pop up next time I'm in the store.

Wesley Clark's campaign staff have developed, or commissioned, or otherwise come up with, a ClarkBot, which scans Feedster's RSS search engine every day looking for references to the General and then posts them to a section of the campaign blog. It's picked up pretty much everything I've ever said about the man, and if you're blogging and have an RSS feed, likely everything you've ever said about him either. The bot doesn't attempt to pass judgment on whether the comment is favorable or not; it simply reproduces the item and posts a link.

At the bottom of the page is this useful advice:

Seems reasonable to me.

I note in passing that I got married twenty-six years ago today, in the middle of a blizzard.

Today: sunshine and 58, and I suspect both of us are happier four hundred miles apart.

Dear Michele:

No matter where you go, you'll find that it's the finest folks who have preserved their 45s for posterity.

Of course, posterity doesn't always appreciate our gifts, but so what else is new?

Connecticut Senator Joseph Lieberman came to Tulsa today, pitching his tax plan, which he says will cut taxes for 98 percent of the middle class, whoever they may be these days, while raising taxes on the top few and somehow balancing the budget. I'm not entirely convinced there are enough taxpayers among those top few to make up the deficit — if you took every dime from Warren Buffett and Bill Gates, you'd leave them broke and you'd still have $250 billion or so to collect and next year's deficit would remain untouched — but at least he's offering, beyond the usual platitudes, some actual numbers to play with.

If you've got a spare $10,130 burning a hole in your pocket, you can come live next door to me for a year.

I've been avoiding asking the owner just how much he wanted to rent the place, but someone pulled one too many information sheets out of the little plastic tube, and the extra one was found lodged just this side of my flower bed, and thus informed, I pass the details on to you.

What you get: Three bedrooms, two bathrooms, central heat and air, washer/dryer connections, 1550 square feet of space by whatever arcane mathematics they use to determine such things, decently huge back yard, the dubious privilege of living next door to me.

What you don't get: A garage (this one has been converted to actual living space), much of a view.

What they want: Twelve-month lease, $650 deposit, $790 a month.

What they don't want: Smokers, pet owners, Section 8.

I haven't been inside, but the outside is pretty decent, and it's a block and a half to the grade school, if that matters to you.

Marietta, Oklahoma is known for basically one thing: cookies.

This week, no cookies: Bake-Line Group, the national baking conglomerate founded by former Keebler officers, Marietta's largest employer, has closed all seven of its bakeries and announced plans to file for Chapter 7 bankruptcy.

About 300 people out of Marietta's population of 2300 worked for Bake-Line.

Emperor Misha can give you lots of reasons why the President's it's-not-really-amnesty plan is something less than wonderful, but the argument that truly knots the Imperial BVDs is the one that goes like this:

Oh, yeah?

And Spoons attacks the same premise from a different angle entirely:

The President is buying a dubious premise: we can't really do anything about the however many million illegals we already have, so let's do something with that all-important "feel-good" quality, preferably before the election. His options, shall we say, have shrunk mightily. Nothing particularly unusual about this motivation, but it's still disheartening to see it.

Besides, the word that counts here isn't the word that's said, which is "can't", but the word that's meant, which is "won't".

If we're going to take this war-on-terror stuff seriously, we have to have control of our borders, not because Mexico is sending us terrorists — they aren't — but because any weak point can and will be exploited by terrorists. So long as the borders remain porous, so long as there is little or no fear of deportation, Homeland Security is nothing more than a guy in a suit with a bunch of paint chips.

Is it just me, or is Mike suffering brain freeze?

Mad #438 (February) is hyping its fake letter from Michael Jackson, but the spread you have to see is a six-page satire by Jeff Kruse called "The League of Rejected Superheroes". It's decent enough, but what makes it work is that Mad somehow managed to snag some Big-Name Artists. (Yeah, I know, Mad is a corporate cousin to DC Comics, but still, there's some sort of Wall of Separation between them.)

Frank Miller introduces you to Inebrion, a superhero who has had one or two or a quadrillion too many.

J. Scott Campbell shows you Scantily-Clad Woman, for whom "wonderbra" is more than a mere brand name.

Dave Gibbons presents the Entomologist, who apparently was bitten by a radioactive tortoise at the zoo while he was trying to get the attention of some of the spiffier bugs. (No relation to Dr. Weevil.)

John Byrne illustrates Mediocre Man, so far the only superhero who acquired his powers through a Sally Struthers home-study course.

John Romita, Jr. gives us Sloggtor of Globbzorr, who is apparently fortysomething and divorced.

Michael Allred delineates Vocabulon, to whom sesquipedalianism is just the beginning.

Arthur Adams found time to draw Apathenia, Queen of Not Giving a Damn, who first appeared in BFD Comics back in 1993.

And finally, from the pen of Jim Lee, The Incredible Infringement Man, who...what's that? Any more and I'll have to pay royalties?

(Actually, I just wanted to get something up on this before Four Color Hell found out.)

This was as clean a slogan as we could come up with for my high-school graduating class, which was, indeed, the class of '69.

In the meantime, I'm happy to exhume the phrase for Carnival of the Vanities #69, brought to you nine minutes at a time by Snooze Button Dreams, incorporating the Best of the Blogs, plus something of mine to level the playing field.

The pavement-inhaling WRX aside, Subaru, perhaps more than any other automotive marque, gets respect from the Greener Than Thou crowd, inasmuch as it makes generally sensibly-sized vehicles which eschew the more egregious frills one finds on other brands; Fuji Heavy Industries, the manufacturer, is viewed as the Anti-Detroit. (The fact that General Motors owns a small chunk of Fuji is either overlooked or ignored.)

So there will be wailing and gnashing of teeth when word gets around that there will be just enough modifications made to the 2005 edition of Subaru's popular Outback wagon and sedan to qualify them under Federal regulations as light trucks, subject to a less-stringent fuel-economy standard. The reason for this is blindingly simple: there's a horsepower race on, and Subaru doesn't want to be left behind. The wagon, at least, might pass for a truck, given the proliferation of crossover quasi-SUVs, but the sedan?

One wail has already been heard. The Sierra Club's Daniel Becker, seeing shades of 1984 in these 2005 models, pronounced: "This is a new low for the auto industry and it would make George Orwell proud." I would remind Mr Becker that when you have stupid rules (and Corporate Average Fuel Economy is the poster child for stupid rules), you can expect stupid stratagems to get around them.

(Via Autoextremist.com)

Carnival #69 from Snooze Button Dreams is sending a fairly huge number of people to this site, startling in view of the lame attempt at humor I submitted for inclusion this week.

If you've just arrived here and the offending item has scrolled away, this is the drone you're looking for.

A filler item in The Oklahoman read like this:

As noted by yours truly back in March 1998, www.socialsecurity.org is the Cato Institute's privatization page.

I would advise area Social Security recipients to log on to the correct Internet site when seeking information about their Social Security benefits or Medicare services.

Back in October, commenting on a big bank merger, I said this:

Needless to say, this was before J. P. Morgan Chase put up $58 billion for Bank One.

That bit about not putting all your eggs in one basket doesn't at all anticipate that the baskets might want them there.

(About that title: Back in the pre-Morgan days, Chase had a brief advertising campaign to the effect of "Put The Chase behind you," usually with someone who isn't really a businessman but who plays one on TV saying something like "When I need to expand, I put The Chase behind me." One of our language pundits, probably either Edwin Newman or William Safire, pointed out that putting something behind you had an entirely different meaning to some people: "Thank God, I never have to bank there again!")

Well, okay, it wasn't that unique, but Rammer and I bent a couple of brewskis and bemoaned the sad state of Damn Near Everything this evening, which meant that we had to do some rather speedy bemoaning.

I don't think he quite grasps the Oklahoma Zeitgeist just yet, but then hardly do I, and I've been here thirty years or so. Still, it was good to see the guy, and being a long way from home, he may well have thought it was good to be seen.

We'll have to do this again sometime.

Four men will be on next month's ballot to select a Mayor for Oklahoma City, to fill the last two years of the term vacated by Kirk Humphreys.

The presumed front-runner, at least for now, is Ward 1 Councilman Mick Cornett ("one of the rich Cornetts," Susanna might say); challenging are former Ward 1 Councilman F. O. "Frosty" Peak, bookstore owner Jim Tolbert, and Marcus Hayes, director of social services of a local senior center.

The ballot is nonpartisan; a runoff if needed will be held in April.

Erica is irked by the ubiquitous term "bestseller":

And possibly "We shipped so many of these books that it's got to be a hit, and by the time they're remaindered, nobody will remember what we said anyway."

Besides, book quality and book sales have a tangential relationship at best.

A bill to legalize tattooing in South Carolina has passed the state Senate, and a longtime opponent in the House has apparently dropped his opposition, pending the adoption of his recommended amendment.

Should the Palmetto State make body art legal, it will be the 49th state to do so. I need hardly point out who's holding out.

What's the worst possible telephone number you can imagine?

If the first thing you come up with is 867-5309, you might want to check with these folks.

(Courtesy of my infamous old pal Dull N. Boring. No credit for knowing what the N is for.)

These days, it is an article of faith — one might even call it a faith-based article — that academics of a conservative bent are this close to being on the Endangered Species List, and that the leftists in charge would be gleeful at the possibility of their extinction.

As with most stereotypes, there's a kernel of truth somewhere within, and the example I know best comes from right here in Soonerland, where Professor David Deming of the University of Oklahoma, who has run afoul of the Forces of Political Correctness before, claimed on KWTV this week that his academic career has been stymied by higher-ups who object to his manifest conservatism. (There is, at least temporarily, a RealPlayer video clip at NewsOK.com.)

Dr Deming last galvanized the opposition against him in 2000, when a Yale Daily News piece by student Joni Kletter was reprinted locally. Kletter argued that "easy access to a handgun allows everyone in this country...to quickly and easily kill as many random people as they want." Deming sent a letter to the Oklahoma Daily, suggesting that similarly, women in general and Kletter in particular have the capacity, because of "easy access" to sexual equipment, to have sex with random people — and that he hoped Kletter was "as responsible with her equipment as most gun owners are with theirs."

Not the most subtle of analogies, but Deming made his point, and was duly punished for it. A couple of dozen complaints were filed with the University's Office of Equal Opportunity and Affirmative Action. The University, seeing it as a First Amendment issue, dismissed the complaints. The complainants appealed the dismissal, and the University scheduled a hearing; under pressure from local media and from the Center for Individual Rights, which was preparing to sue the University on Deming's behalf, the charges were dropped once again. It seems reasonable to believe, though, that there are still people seething over the fact that Deming is still teaching at OU.

Dr John Dean, then dean of the College of Geophysics, had written Deming over the Kletter affair, to this effect:

Dr Dean is still Deming's boss.

(Update, 18 January, 8 pm: Deming says he has lost a class and has been banished to a basement office.)

Alison Jane's Frolic and Detour reminds us of the purpose — and the limitations — of that "freedom of speech" business:

Emphasis added.

I figure most of you already knew this, but it bears repeating.

The California Yankee is not inclined to cut Connecticut Governor John G. Rowland any slack:

Well, I did find one kind word, from Mike Alissi, publisher of Reason, who offers a modest defense of the governor:

Okay, one Connecticut resident on Rowland's side. Sort of.

In 1977, the two Cincinnati daily newspapers, Gannett's Enquirer and E. W. Scripps' Post, entered a Joint Operating Agreement, under which they would maintain separate news operations but pool their advertising and circulation functions. The agreement was for ten years, and would be automatically renewed unless one of the two parties opted out with three years' notice. The Department of Justice approved the deal in 1979.

Gannett has now officially informed Scripps that they are opting out, that the JOA will end at the end of 2007.

Evening papers in general have been in decline; Post circulation today is one-quarter what it was when the deal with the Enquirer was struck.

What may save the Post is its strength south of the Ohio River, where a separate Kentucky Post edition is circulated for readers in northern Kentucky.

The next two JOAs up for renewal are in Birmingham, Alabama and Tucson, Arizona: both expire in 2015.

From Miscellaneous, Etc., a Friday Five item engages the Rage Reflex:

Of course, here in Oklahoma, we're more interested in suing over license plates than in agonizing over them, but maybe it's because they cost so much here to begin with that we're disinclined to spend the extra $25 or so.

For the record, I briefly entertained the idea of a vanity plate — "DCXXVI", if you're curious — but decided I would likely get rear-ended by some fool on the Belle Isle Bridge trying to decipher the damned thing.

Mike Taibbi, in the New York Press, asserts that "voters are repulsed by weakness," and, by extension, the Democrats as we know them:

Okay, they don't stand for anything. Can they kick ass?

This may explain why there's been only the faintest rattling of sabres in the general direction of Pyongyang: North Korea, absent its smallish collection of fungible nukes, can't afford so much as a Brown Bag Special at Sonic.

What to do? Taibbi suggests that an upcoming Democratic administration, assuming there will be an upcoming Democratic administration within any of our lifetimes, leverage what perceived advantage they may have in domestic affairs — the GOP owns foreign policy — and simply annex the rest of the world, thereby making everything effectively (or, knowing the Democrats, ineffectively) domestic. Pax americana, here we come.

The rental next door is still vacant, but across the street and one down, there's a sale. After the owner sank some serious dollars into refurbishing the place and then sat by the phone for a month of FSBOing, he finally bit the bullet and called in an Expert, who promptly sold the place in half a week.

As everyone knows, the three major guiding principles of real estate are location, location, and location, perhaps in that very order. But in my case, at least, to make the deal work, it also took research, elbow grease, and good ol' dumb luck. I wouldn't be at all surprised to hear the same story from the new folks on the block when they get here.

Christy at Digital Nirvana follows, she says, the Bushido Way of the Blogger:

I don't know. Sometimes exercising one's lesser, baser instincts can be good fun, good catharsis, and even good blogging, though I don't think anyone this side of [fill in name of your personal bête noire in blogdom] can pull it off on a regular basis.

It is, however, true that this very situation was anticipated thirty-odd years ago. In the words of the late Eric Hilliard Nelson: "You can't please everyone, so you got to please yourself." I'm not about to claim that every last one of the three hundred thousand or so words I've tossed up on screen is a keeper, but I'd like to think that they were a reasonable approximation of what I was thinking at the time they were written. To that extent, I suppose, I'm pleased with the results of these ninety-three months.

Something called BlogSex is looking for participants.

They're advertising on some sites. I spotted them at BlogShares and at BlogChalking, where they're making the following pitch:

I submit that if you're experiencing nymphomania, you're not going to get a hell of a lot of typing done.

With a minor amount of Googlage, I was able to turn up the following:

Given the flurry of blog weddings in recent months, I'm really not convinced we need this thing; I mean, if you're putting your heart on the screen already, what's the point of doing it again somewhere else?

And right before Valentine's Day? Talk about your cruel and unusual punishments.

One piece you simply must read today: Dean Esmay pays tribute — beautifully — to the very first woman in his life.

Bruce and I don't agree on too many things, but I definitely buy this observation:

Right. One of my justifications for moving into the city was to have fewer excuses to pass up an event because it was "too far to drive." And while my after-hours life isn't exactly scintillating these days, it's no longer nonexistent, which surely is worth something.

(There are only four Borders stores in the whole state, and it probably would have taken just as long to get to 81st and Yale; the Oklahoma City store is only about 1.4 miles from me, but Full Circle is closer, and it's locally owned, which I tend to view as a plus.)

We do love a parade on the Lone Prairie. Last year, over 40,000 turned out to celebrate the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday; only Houston's MLK parade drew a bigger crowd. And while there's a certain irony in the fact that the parade route doesn't actually come within a mile of the street that bears King's name, holding the festivities downtown serves as a reminder that while Dr King was indisputably a black man, the values he preached were values for all of us, race and color nothwithstanding.

In the morning, before all the hoopla, there will be a silent march through northeast Oklahoma City to commemorate the marches led by Dr King in the Sixties. It will begin at the Ralph Ellison Library at 23rd and (yes!) MLK Avenue, and end at the Oklahoma Historical building at 22nd and Lincoln, where a bell will be rung to break the silence.

I've got to work — 42nd and Treadmill waits for no one — but at least one Oklahoma blogger will be in the parade: JMBranum of JMBZine will be marching with the local branch of the Green Party.

In 1999, the Cherokee Nation held a constitutional convention, the tribe's first since 1976. That was the easy part.

For the next three years, a translator worked to port the resulting document from English into the Cherokee language.

Now comes the task of getting the constitution approved by the President of the United States, or by the Bureau of Indian Affairs on his behalf, as required by the previous Cherokee constitution. The tribe has passed an amendment to delete the Federal vetting requirement, but the BIA is balking.

Eventually, I suspect, the BIA will come around. And one of the provisions of the constitution allows the Cherokee Nation to send a non-voting delegate to Congress, which should be interesting.

Kelley's been so incredibly busy lately that it seems almost impossible she could squeeze anything more complicated than going to the bathroom into her schedule.

Still, impossible things do happen, and here's an impromptu Cul de Sac for a Monday afternoon, full of fresh bloggy goodness and, yes, twice as absorbent as the cheaper stuff.

This turned out to be one of those days when I had a lot of writing to do, none of which involved bloggage.

If you're bound and determined to see what it was, there's a new Vent, regarding the Iowa caucuses and why they elicit yawns — from me, anyway — and a review of Befour, the last album by Brian Auger and the Trinity.

Mondays are like that, sometimes.

It's called the Cabin Fever Cluster, and it's a four-day weekend of dog shows in Muncie, Indiana.

Except this year. The Horizon Convention Center decided that they couldn't risk hosting the shows because of their new carpeted floor, and the clubs involved weren't about to put down plastic sheeting and watch a thousand dogs slip and slide all over the place.

I wonder if Greg Hlatky was planning to bring any Borzoi to Muncie.

House Bill 1888, introduced into the Oklahoma legislature by Rep. John Trebilcock (R-Broken Arrow), would impose a two-year waiting period on outgoing lawmakers wishing to become Capitol lobbyists, and would forbid them to accept "anything of value" during those two years.

I doubt this will go anywhere, especially with a number of lawmakers facing term limits and having to get real jobs, but Trebilcock, a first-termer who previously taught high school history and government, points out: "A lot of [legislators] go to the Capitol wanting to change things and they think they have to play the game. Or they become cynical. Eventually they forget why they went there."

And the occasional reminder never hurts.

The resurgence of John Edwards, who finished a strong second in Iowa, does not impress McGehee:

I still think Edwards deserves points for being Anyone But Dean, but that's hardly a unique distinction.

About a month ago, I described Hartford, Connecticut, where Governor John G. Rowland is somewhere between this close and this close to impeachment, as the Little Easy, quoting political rival Bill Curry's remark that Rowland had turned Connecticut into "Louisiana with foliage."

Well, Louisiana may be considered the Big Time in political corruption, but according to this report by Corporate Crime Reporter, America's Sweatbox is only the third most corrupt of the fifty states, trailing Mississippi and North Dakota. (North Dakota?)

Criterion for ranking: number of public corruption convictions in the state over a ten-year period (1993-2002) per 100,000 population. Connecticut, on this scale, comes in at a relatively-virtuous thirty-first; Oklahoma ranks twenty-second, and the sanitary state of Nebraska is the cleanest of them all. (The District of Columbia is not rated because, well, it would go clear off the scale.)

(Muchas gracias: Brock Sides, Signifying Nothing. Of the two authors of this blog, Mr Sides is the one who doesn't live in Mississippi — though Memphis is awfully close.)

The universe of rock and soul contains some truly memorable screams, from James Brown's opening shout in "I Got You (I Feel Good)" to Roger Daltrey's anguished shriek right before "Meet the new boss, same as the old boss" in "Won't Get Fooled Again".

Howard Dean's uncontrolled emission in Iowa, the sound of a man choking on his second Pan Galactic Gargle Blaster, doesn't quite match this lofty standard, but apparently, unlike these examples, it works with a number of different songs, and, well, there's a lot to be said for versatility.

I'm pretty sure the Dwight David Eisenhower National Defense Interstate Highway System and Cobalt Testing Range, or whatever the hell it's officially called, was never intended for commuters; the very word "Interstate" would seem to make that clear. Still, if a road is there, you tend to use it, and I don't have any particular qualms about using it for the bulk of my newly-tripled commute.

On the other hand, I've got to wonder about that character in the purple Dodge with no license plate (he had a cardboard placard in the rear window indicating the number of the plate he presumably had lost) this morning. It was bad enough that he was in the right lane of the Northwest Distressway signaling left; eventually he figured out that he was wearing out his blinker and followed the lane up the approach to the Belle Isle Bridge and I-44, a ramp cutting the tightest possible curve to match the curvature of the bridge itself. Once in place on the freeway, he promptly exited at Western Avenue, having driven barely half a mile on I-44. Why did he bother? Admittedly, surface streets in this area border on the incomprehensible, but we're talking a few blocks at most. This can't be what General Eisenhower had in mind.

As counterpoint, the stereo burst into that fake bluegrass ditty about rotting roadkill — you know the one — and as the song began to fade, the scent of eau de polecat made its presence known.

C'mon, stink!

You should not count Andrea Harris among the undecided:

This seems unlikely, unless baby entrails can be classified as a commodity and futures can be bought and sold on the Chicago Board of Trade. On the other hand, this would certainly simplify No Child Left Behind.