I have always argued that the reason the popular music of the 1960s is still around is not so much that it's better than music from other decades of that century, but that it's infinitely extensible: unlike hits more obviously tethered to their time and place, the best Sixties tunes have a universal quality to them that keep them going, year after year, decade after decade.

A brilliant example of what I mean popped up today on the Dawn Patrol. Riffing on the opening lines to "Game of Love" by Wayne Fontana and the Mindbenders ("The purpose of a man is to love a woman/And the purpose of a woman is to love a man"), Dawn Eden seizes on a notion and runs with it:

I've tried to tiptoe around this subject myself, although it's mostly due to morose self-absorption: every girl I've ever had breaks my heart and leaves me sad. Still, I have to admire the ingenuity that went into it, and if you're thinking maybe this is a prime example of rhetorical overkill, well, Mama said there'd be days like this.

For the first time since 1999, Dow Jones has shuffled the portfolio that makes up their oft-quoted Industrial Average.

AT&T, International Paper and Eastman Kodak, all of which have been part of the DJIA for decades, will be dropped as of the start of trading 8 April. Replacing them will be AIG, Pfizer and Verizon.

The reasoning, from Wall Street Journal managing editor Paul E. Steiger:

Adjustment factors are applied to insure that there is no numerical discontinuity when changes are made to the portfolio; it has been many years since the DJIA was determined by simply adding the prices of those thirty stocks.

Someone passed to me what is represented as "internal polling from CHS (Cole Hardgrave [sic] Snodgrass)" regarding the Republican candidates for the Senate seat currently held by the retiring Don Nickles. CHS is a real firm, once headed by Rep. Tom Cole (R-OK 4) — the other partners are Sharon Hargrave Caldwell and Deby Snodgrass — and while I can't think of any reason why anyone from CHS would leak things to me, I'm reprinting it here just to see what happens.

 40% - Tom Coburn
 25% - Kirk Humphreys
  9% - Bob Anthony
  2% - Linda Murphy

CHS is working on the Humphreys campaign, so they can't be particularly happy about these numbers.

(Linda Murphy, in case you've forgotten, was appointed Secretary of Education in the Keating administration — Democrats in the legislature refused to confirm her appointment — after having run unsuccessfully against Sandy Garrett for State Superintendent.)

Of course, not being a Republican, I can't vote in their primary. I will hazard the following speculations:

(1) I thought Kirk Humphreys was going to shrug off this Bass Pro thing — as Mayor of Oklahoma City, he pushed hard for the $18 million city subsidy to the chain to park a store in Bricktown — until Bass Pro let it be known that they were building a larger store in Broken Arrow, for which they got no subsidy whatsoever.

(2) Bob Anthony, the maverick of the Corporation Commission, may be too much of an iconoclast for Oklahoma Republicans.

(3) The same might be said of Tom Coburn, who has a tendency to resist suggestions that he "go along to get along."

The primary will be held 27 July; a lot can happen between now and then, and this being Oklahoma, something almost certainly will.

An observation to which I can relate, courtesy of Robb Hibbard (31 March, 5:15 pm):

In my case, a tarp.

But inasmuch as I now live in an older neighborhood and have an actual mail slot in the door, rather than the much-hated (and, in this particular instance, badly-arranged) cluster boxes provided by the Pitiable Hovel, nobody's delicate sensibilities are affected.

Besides, I have no shortage of Ts.

Her full name was Rosemarie Timotea Aurro, but by the time they squoze it down to fit on the label of a 45, she'd become Timi Yuro.

The small name, however, was attached to a BIG voice. In 1961, not yet twenty-one, she took a humdrum mid-50s R&B pout and turned it into an event.

I'm...so...HURT....

How powerful, this voice? Elvis himself cut this tune, and it's still Timi's version you remember.

Timi Yuro sang lots of things. We forget, for instance, that she got the pop hit of Hank Cochran's "Make the World Go Away", two whole years before Eddy Arnold conquered Nashville with it; in between hits, she recorded old standards, folk tunes, and anything else she could fit in. (It helped that she was recording for Liberty, a record company which didn't believe in underutilizing their artists.)

But I'm spinning "What's A Matter Baby" right now, her big 1962 hit, and the hair on the back of my neck is standing at attention.

And my hurtin' is just about over
But baby, it's just startin' for you

Sung and recorded at the very edge of distortion, then remixed by Phil Spector, this may be Yuro's best: the voice is just as big, and the finger she's pointing is even bigger.

Throat cancer, which wouldn't stay put even after they removed her larynx, ended her career; finally, having migrated to the brain, it ended her life this week.

Along Southeast 29th Street, north of Tinker Air Force Base, there's a stretch where it looks like something used to be there, but isn't anymore. No mystery, really: development in this area was halted, and existing development actually removed, in an effort to reduce encroachment on Tinker, and to deprive the BRAC (Base Realignment and Closure) folks of an excuse to close the base. ("You've got houses right along the flight path, fercryingoutloud.")

Apparently even more area is going to be cleared: the Powers Nissan dealership at 8021 SE 29th has been condemned by County Commissioners after Mr Powers balked at their $2.5-million dollar offer for the property. District 1 Commissioner Jim Roth suggests that Powers, who originally had been leasing the property, timed his acquisition to maximize the possible take; he bought the tract two years ago for $2.15 million on the same day as the bond election held to raise money to acquire properties for an expanded clearance zone.

Powers says he'd take the offer right now if he had a place to go, but he's having problems finding a suitable new location. The commissioners want the space cleared off by summer.

Disclosure: I bought a car from Powers' dealership some years ago. Nothing in the transaction suggested to me that there might be weasels in the boardroom; I've always considered them straight shooters.

It's standard operating procedure for public-radio stations, during their semiannual pledge drives, to sound just as mournful and Oliver Twisted — "Please, sir, I want some more money" — as they possibly can.

Even allowing for this tendency, there seems to be a lot more desperation than usual in the voices at our local NPR station, and I'm wondering: could the listeners be responding to the reassignment of Bob Edwards by cutting back their donations?

I may be imagining things — wouldn't be the first time — but I have a feeling that NPR management is going to wind up with low-cholesterol free-range egg on their faces when all this is over.

I have no reason to think I provided any inspiration, but Steve Gigl has decided to name his house.

And, with the ratio of fireplaces to chimneys an inexplicable 3:2, Chimneyhenge hews to a certain perverse sort of logic, don't you think?

What a visual Donna conjures up here:

Now I'm not a fan of the usual ethereal, wan, almost wussy characterization of Christ that shows up in entirely too much Western art and semi-art, but this adds a whole new, um, dimension to Mark 15:31.

"He saved others, himself he cannot save," indeed.

Addendum: On a scale of 35 to 98, rate the probability that I will burn in hell for this post.

Update, 3 April, 4:20 pm: She went, and she's reevaluated the guy playing the lead:

Still: Meat Loaf? Donna, I'm crazy about you, but you're scaring me.

You follow the news for any length of time, you quickly pick up on Standard Media Qualifiers. Angry Palestinians, for instance, are generally described as "militants," even in circumstances where "terrorists" might be more appropriate. Conservative groups like the Heritage Foundation are usually dubbed "right-wing think tanks." (Left-wing think tanks, of course, are hardly ever identified as such.) And homosexuals who aren't closeted are referred to as "openly gay," a term which, says Laura, rings false:

Actually, I think this particular media term is intended mostly as CYA: "We're not the ones who outed this person, so don't blame us." And there still being a thriving business in opening the doors to closets despite the wishes of the occupants thereof, I'm not surprised that its usage has persisted.

Now when we start seeing people described as "openly straight," I'll know the pendulum has completed its swing.

In 1966, H. Richard Lawson graduated from tiny Oklahoma Christian College with a computer-science degree, going on to Purdue for postgraduate work. Lawson Software set up shop in Minnesota in 1975 in the arcane field of enterprise software, and today has grown to 1700 employees worldwide.

And now Lawson and his wife Pat (OC '67) have bestowed upon a much-grown Oklahoma Christian University a gift of 4 million shares of Lawson common stock, presently worth over $30 million, one of the largest gifts in the school's history. OC won't be going on a buying spree, though; most of the money will be allocated to the school's permanent endowment.

I didn't have to go to work today, which means that I missed out on one last opportunity to do the 11-mile trek from Surlywood to 42nd and Treadmill in actual daylight; of course, that Spring Forward nonsense kicks in tonight and shoves the clock further out of sync with reality, to the benefit of — whom, exactly?

Well, for one brief, shining moment, Erica:

Okay. That's a tangible gain. Anyone else?

The OkiePundit has identified code words used by Oklahoma politicians of a certain stripe:

Well, shooting stuff is actually a pretty good use for those "lethal weapons," but the Sunday-school teachers I've met — admittedly a small sample — didn't strike me as particularly interested in marginalizing people. Maybe it's different in Senate District 18, a narrow vee in the spirit of Elbridge Gerry which extends from east Tulsa to a corner of Grand Lake, where the Pundit doesn't actually dwell but did find these terms in a mailing.

Thursday, the President signed into law something called the Unborn Victims of Violence Act, which makes injury to a fetus during an attack on the mother a separate crime.

I don't have a particular problem with this measure, but I don't think it will stand up to scrutiny by the Supreme Court either. Rod Dreher, writing in the blog of The Dallas Morning News (they don't do permalinks — see 1 April, 3:50 pm) explains why:

And Dreher sees another controversy, this one local to Dallas, brewing:

Interestingly, Dreher comments elsewhere (1 April, 3:00 pm) that liberals, at least within earshot of him, complain about how &*%$# right-wing the News' editorial page is. He should hear some of the grumblings about The Oklahoman.

It could be argued, I suppose, that California's so-called "Three Strikes" rule is overly expensive, but as Patterico has been pointing out, the price to be paid for letting career criminals back on the street — and it will be paid: the current measure seeking to amend "Three Strikes" [link requires Adobe Reader] calls for every single sentence issued under its provisions to be rethought — is far higher than can be denominated in mere dollars. Why California would even consider such a thing is beyond me.

And one of Patterico's examples is a sexual predator for whom "repeat offender," as a description, is almost wholly inadequate; you might as well charge Saddam Hussein with littering. This character, whose primary target was girls five to seven, has no business ever getting out of prison. I don't know if I'd go so far as Laura, who recommends as a general policy "Nail their gonads to the ceiling and use 'em as a piñata" — for one thing, I don't want to see what pops out of them when they break — but any law which makes it possible for him to be sprung is a law I don't want to see enacted, in California or anyplace else.

Let's see. The Bush campaign in 2000 spent $185,921,855 for a total of 50,456,002 votes, which works out to about $3.68 per vote.

Pittsburgh writer Dave Copeland, meanwhile, has put his 2004 vote up for auction. I reasoned that at the very least, there would be a House contest on Copeland's ballot, and since he's a thoughtful sort of person, he probably puts as much effort into researching a Congressional candidate as he would a Presidential wannabe, so I doubled the $3.68 and entered a bid slightly in excess of $7.36.

Oops: someone has already bid higher than that.

At least Dave Copeland has the satisfaction of knowing that his vote, to someone anyway, is worth more than the votes of the rest of us out here in the Teeming Milieu.

(Via The Last Page, who is one of those people who could sell me anything.)

(Well, maybe not turkey bacon.)

It was a lovely sunny day outside: what better time to descend into a dark room in an even darker basement?

Well, actually, it was the last chance to see CityRep's production of Neil Simon's Laughter on the 23rd Floor, which ran for four weeks to solid reviews and decent attendance. CitySpace, the Rep's 90-seat (more or less) facility, somewhere between five-eighths and four-fifths round, sits under the Music Hall; as a late buyer, I got what might be considered the worst seat in the house, but the sightlines were still good.

By now, the story is out: everyone, or at least everyone likely to buy tickets, knows that 23rd Floor is a just-barely-fictionalized retelling of Simon's experience as a fledgling writer on Sid Caesar's Golden Age variety series Your Show of Shows, the staff of which, when they went their separate ways, would continue to make great comedy. But trying to match up the individual characters with Woody Allen or Mel Brooks or Carl Reiner or Larry Gelbart is really irrelevant; what matters here is the idea, which I endorse wholeheartedly, that trying to be funny will drive you crazy. And Simon's balancing act, just enough pathos to remind you why these people love what they do, is difficult to describe, let alone express, but director Catrin Parker pulls it off deftly. The cast (with two substitutions for "medical reasons") is obviously having a wonderful time, and the only time I felt slightly out of sorts was when I contrasted Simon's words with Dennis Palumbo's (and, rumor has it, some of Mel Brooks') in the 1982 film My Favorite Year, set in, yes, a just-barely-fictionalized version of Sid Caesar's Golden Age variety series Your Show of Shows. Then again, Dick Benjamin's movie didn't have anyone who grabbed at my heart quite as efficiently as Brenda Williams, who plays Carol, the sole female writer on the 23rd Floor staff.

And speaking of grabbing at my heart, I felt a small twinge driving home. High clouds had moved in, but there was still lots of bright. The city had turned on the sprinklers in the parklike center median of Shartel through Crown Heights, and there was a couple, maybe thirtysomething, dashing through the water jets, soaked to the skin, quite possibly having the time of their lives. Alas, I'm short on dash these days.

Lynn S. heard the big BOOM, and — well, let her tell you:

Might have been. Meth labs are second only to wind in terms of sheer ubiquity in these parts; a couple weeks ago they found one operating out of a hotel room on Route 66, about three-quarters of a mile from me. Nothing was blown up, but the mere presence of the damned thing was disconcerting. For all I know, there may be another one by now.

The state thinks they can curb the industry — and let's face it, by now it's big enough to be considered an industry — by restricting sales of products containing pseudoephedrine, a common base ingredient in meth. Wishful thinking, say I.

I've kept my distance from the current Kos célèbre, generally, but I must point out that there really isn't anything particulary surprising about The Remark: according to various leftist pronouncements, doing anything for money is somehow a little bit unseemly, too capitalist to sit well with people who spent all their intellectual capital on Marxist ideology. Halliburton is reviled, partially because it's an American corporation — its ties to Vice President Cheney are purely incidental — but mostly because it's making money in a war zone.

This notion extends well beyond Iraq, and it's one reason the left is constantly calling for the government to undertake tasks that could just as well be done by the private sector: privatized operations are more interested in the bottom line than in the Good of All Mankind, and the government would never be so tacky as to turn an actual profit. Whether the private firm can do a better job at less expense is irrelevant.

Thus the complaint about "mercenaries." Whether those poor folks met the definition of the word or not, they were working for a private firm, and therefore their deaths should be considered even more meaningless than those of our "real" troops.

Don't get them started on health care. Please.

Ford is coming under fire in Britain for an attempt at viral marketing in which the sunroof of the SportKa minicar, in the process of closing, decapitates a cat.

According to Ford, this campaign and a similar one showing a pigeon smacking into the hood were developed and promptly rejected for reasons of taste; they have no idea how they were leaked to the Net.

Ads for GM's Vauxhall unit have already attacked the Ford spots as "acts of such blatant cruelty in a desperate attempt to sell cars."

Syaffolee, on a recent concert appearance by Joshua Bell:

Now I'm actually sorry I missed him.

By way of explanation: Rich Appel has a spiffy e-zine called Hz So Good, and for the next, um, cycle, he asked rock critic, liner-note maven and all-around dreamboat Dawn Eden to put together some thoughts about Gene Pitney's 1963 hit "Twenty-Four Hours from Tulsa." Since I'm somewhere within that radius myself, Dawn offered a copy to me for my own wacky site, and of course I said yes, so here it is.

The first thing I notice about this song is that Billy Joe Royal or his arranger shamelessly lifted its intro for the intro of "Down in the Boondocks." Neither song is a favorite of mine, despite my appreciation of Royal and downright adoration of Pitney — a masterful songwriter and one of the greatest performers I've ever seen.

This song gets under my skin from the beginning, with Hal David's lyric, "Dearest... darling..." I realize that, compositionwise, it's a great lyric, because it captures the guilt that the protagonist feels in his situation. But knowing that doesn't make it sound any less cloying.

Bacharach and David understood camp, even before Susan Sontag popularized the term. Indeed, this song has a sense of wicked irony that would do Quentin Tarantino proud. It's all in the lyrics' unusual, twisted perspective.

Usually Brill Building songs sung by men were written in such a way that a female listener could pretend the song was being sung to her. This was true of so many of Pitney's early hits: "(I Wanna) Love My Life Away," "Every Breath I Take," "Only Love Can Break a Heart." What Hal David did with this song was put the listener in Pitney's place, imagining the risk and delight of succumbing to temptation. The girl to whom Pitney is singing — or, as the lyrics say, writing his letter — is a pathetic dupe, robbed of her eternal bliss by some floozy Pitney picked up at a motel just a few hundred miles down the road.

Even the title "Twenty-Four Hours from Tulsa" is camp. To a pair of hack songwriters (and say what you will, Bacharach and David in 1963 were hacks) in an airless cubicle in the Brill Building, Tulsa was truly down in the boondocks. Those young but already hardened Tin Pan Alley tunesmiths, cigarettes dangling from their mouths, probably visualized the recipient of the protagonist's letter as some blonde Southern belle — maybe the virgin daughter of a wealthy oilman. How funny to think of her soldier-boy beau, returning from duty on some Texas base (for we know those Southerners are too thick to get a college deferment), falling for a streetwalker outside a Red Roof Inn.

Excuse me while I press "skip."

You can read Dawn Eden's daily exploits at The Dawn Patrol; if you'd like a free sample of Hz So Good, write to Rich Appel at audiot.savant@verizon.net.

New slogan at Oddly Normal:

Capitalism — improving your world since 1783.

Um...okay. Why 1783? The Treaty of Paris?

Suggestions welcomed.

Occasionally I complain about clowns to the left of me. Lynn would like you to know about jokers to the right:

There was a flap some years back about a Tulsa Union student alleged to be a witch; for the life of me I can't understand why she didn't turn the lot of them into newts.

Lynn continues:

I remember attending a science-fiction con in Tulsa at a hotel opposite ORU, complete with Society of Creative Anachronism displays on the lawn; passersby, observing the jousting, alternated between appalled and actually frightened. "You'd think," I said, gesturing towards Oral's Prayer Tower, "they'd appreciate the medieval around here."

In Oklahoma City, where I now live, our moonbats work on policy, not on philosophy: the poster child is probably Rep. Bill Graves. Proximity to Graves is probably harmful to one's higher brain functions; fortunately, I don't live in his district, and he'll be term-limited into oblivion soon enough.

To anyone who was pleased that the Los Angeles Times picked up five Pulitzer Prizes, the second-largest single haul in the award's history — I think we can safely say that the cheering section won't include Xrlq or Patterico — I remind you:

You can't spell "Pulitzer" without "putz."

Oh, yes, The Oklahoman got one once. In 1939. For editorial cartoons (by the late Charles G. Werner). Don't hold your breath waiting for the second.

Anyone who has heard me sing (you know who you are) will not at all be anxious to repeat the experience; my voice on its best day can make a turnip weep, and it's been a while since I've had a good day, laryngeally speaking. So some might consider it cause for alarm that I've just taken delivery of six CDs of karaoke backgrounds.

But these aren't ordinary backgrounds by any stretch of the imagination: these are actual backing tracks from Motown hits, played by the genuine Funk Brothers, remixed and remastered by studio wizard Suha Gur. Each disc contains eight tunes in two-track mixes, instruments left, vocals right, perhaps for practice. And then, starting at track 9, the same tunes, mixed for stereo, minus the lead vocals.

If you're wondering why anyone would listen to these discs for any other purpose, wonder no more. Motown production techniques were remarkable for their time, and it simply hasn't been possible to observe them at close range up to now: Berry Gordy's primary interest was the mono singles mix, which he intended to knock your socks off, not to impress you with subtlety and detail. Stereo mixes were generally afterthoughts, and sometimes they didn't bother with them at all.

But since Suha Gur had to go back to the session tapes to produce these tracks, generation upon generation of murk and noise and glop and tape slap and God knows what else have simply disappeared. And without the primary distraction of the lead singer, you can delight in the Funk Brothers' instrumental work. I've got "My Guy" cranked up now, and with Mary Wells out of the room, the interplay between lead guitar and organ, nearly inaudible on the 45, has me grinning from here to there, thinking "Damn, but that's beautiful."

Not every tune comes across as perfectly seamless. In some of the sessions, both background and lead vocals were recorded on the same track, so leaving off the lead required leaving off the background as well. And sometimes a lead, usually Smokey Robinson, drifts in and out of the mix. But as a tool for studying the Sound of Young America, these discs, issued through The Singing Machine Company but not available on their Web site — I got mine from amazon.com — are at least as essential as the Funk Brothers documentary Standing in the Shadows of Motown. And who hasn't wanted to be Levi Stubbs or Martha Reeves for three minutes?

In my neighborhood and a few others, the first Wednesday of the month means Big Junk: this is the day the city makes a separate run to scoop up stuff that won't fit in the standard carts. You're allowed four cubic yards of Big Junk per month; anything over that, they'll pick up, but you'll be billed for the overage.

It's always interesting to see what's been tossed out. In the two blocks east of Surlywood this morning, I spotted flattened cardboard boxes, old furniture, a dishwasher, and about three-quarters of a lawn mower. Some of this stuff may never make it into the truck: scavengers, in between raiding Dumpsters, often make the rounds a few minutes before the city crew. Somehow, though, I doubt any of these, um, informal recyclers would be interested in the tree and a half I dragged out to the curb last night.

Bruce grasps something that a lot of our politicians don't:

All else being equal, we tend to buy whatever's cheapest, which guarantees that nothing will speed the transition to more fuel-efficient vehicles quite as effectively as high prices for fuel. Your standard statist, claiming to be sympathetic to the plight of the poor or some similar smarm, will pursue policies that, were there one gallon of gas left on planet earth, would require that it be sold for a buck and a half, preferably to someone other than Donald Trump. We don't know for sure how long we will be awash in cheap fuel; the least we can do is enjoy it while we have it, and be prepared to move on when we don't.

Incidentally, prices are off about four cents a gallon in my neck of the woods; the going rate at the name-brand stations is generally $1.599, plus or minus a cent or two. I'm anticipating $1.85 a gallon for the slightly-shorter-than-usual World Tour '04 this summer, which will hurt, but it won't hurt as much as staying home.

Oklahoma's primary elections are closed: Democrats vote only for Democrats, Republicans for Republicans. The Oklahoma Libertarian Party, whose membership may be described as "not large," proposed opening their 2000 primary to members of the major parties. The Election Board balked, noting that state law permits them to admit registered Independents, but not members of other recognized parties.

Eventually the Libertarians sued the Election Board; US District Judge Stephen Friot ruled against the party, saying that the law was intended to insure "that the results of a primary election... accurately reflect the voting of the party members." An appeal was filed, and yesterday the 10th US Circuit Court of Appeals reversed Judge Friot's decision in a 3-0 vote.

Nothing in this ruling mandates that the two major parties have to allow crossover voting, but it's a first step towards opening up the primaries, which I think will prove beneficial to third parties in years to come, especially with the general level of dissatisfaction with the Big Boys.

For some of us, the 81 is a dance, dictated by Terpsichore of Philadelphia to Kenny Gamble and Leon Huff and sung, way back in 1964, by Candy and the Kisses.

For you regular folks, who might wear tennis shoes or an occasional python boot, it's the 81st edition of Carnival of the Vanities, presented this week by Ross White's Leaking Pure White Noise.

In 1944, French author Antoine de Saint-Exupéry took off from Corsica in a Lockheed Lightning P-38, to photograph southern France in anticipation of an Allied landing, and was never heard from again.

Not until 1998, when a fisherman off Marseilles turned up a bracelet inscribed with the names of Saint-Exupéry and his wife, was there any clue as to the fate of the author of The Little Prince. Two years later, a diver found some P-38 fragments; the French Ministry of Culture organized a salvage team last year, and a plate with the plane's serial number has now been found, verifying that this is indeed where Saint-Exupéry went down, though no trace of his body has yet been located.

Still unexplained is what caused the plane to crash in the first place; there was no evidence that the plane had been shot down or otherwise damaged in flight. And it still perhaps stings that Saint-Exupéry's narrator in The Little Prince, published the year before his deadly mission, was a downed pilot.

Lynn thinks there's more to the Collective than we've been given to understand:

Let me go on record here as being in favor of exposing several inches of thigh.

Of course, the most startling development in all of the Federation's interactions, so to speak, with the Borg is the fact that once they assimilated someone from France.

But then:

I vote for "twisted moonbat fantasy." No one is forced to buy clothing at Old Navy or lunch at McDonald's. If people escaping the Third World embrace these American icons, it's because they think it's an improvement over what they're used to. And I suspect they'd bitterly resent being told by some Defender of the Culture in beautiful downtown Berkeley that their choices really aren't freely chosen, that they've been duped into accepting something inferior by the force of the hive mind.

Exactly. Fill the box, seal the edges, open the display for public viewing, and make sure nothing ever changes.

And remember: One's connection to the Borg is through external means. It can be broken. Just ask Seven of Nine. Or, for that matter, Jean-Luc Picard.

State Question 676, passed in 1996, limits the increase in assessed value for property-tax purposes to five percent per year.

There are a couple of catches, of course. The actual tax can rise more than five percent, if the tax rate increases. However, since tax increases must be approved by voters, this is less of an issue than it could be.

The other one will hit me this year: if the property is sold or otherwise conveyed, the limitation does not apply, inasmuch as the assessor has to come up with a new set of numbers. Tax bills come out in October. I didn't take possession until the last week of November; at settlement, I paid about one-tenth of the taxes to cover my 36 days of possession for the year. But for 2004, the tax bill will reflect a new, updated, and significantly higher assessment; in subsequent years, the five-percent cap will kick in again.

Assuming the actual rates don't rise, which they haven't in a while and probably won't by October, I'm looking at about a $150 bump in this year's property taxes, which isn't onerous but isn't fun either. The Gods of Escrow will, of course, demand $13 a month to cover the difference.

"The average eight-year-old," it says here, is "explosive, excitable, dramatic, and inquisitive."

And that's just the beginning. Eight-year-olds tend to be:

• Exuberant
  
• Eager for praise
  
• Observers of adult behavior
  
• In high gear
  
• Pleased with group learning
  
• Analytical — evaluate while learning
  
• Imaginative
  
• Caught trying to determine limits
  
• Talkative
  
• Able to see humor
  
• Rule bound
  

All these things you can look for on this very site over the next 365 days: today it's eight years old.

(And looking for them, I hasten to add, doesn't mean you'll find them.)

Update: There's a time line, sort of, in the current Vent.

I think Lileks is getting tired of the Vietnam analogies:

Maybe it's just me, but as a boomer on the cusp of old, I'm inclined to give Nixon a pass, on this matter anyway, and blame this syndrome entirely upon people my age or slightly above who continue to live in the past because they fear they might be irrelevant in the present.

And as fears go — and I've gone with lots of them over the years — this one is as close to guaranteed self-fulfillment as you can get.

Normally traffic accidents, even fatal traffic accidents, fall outside the purview of this site.

But this one, well, it bothered me, mostly because 26 years ago, I actually lived at SE 29th and Vickie Drive, and that intersection was Crash City even then: there's an elevation difference between the two roadways that makes blind spots almost inevitable, and traffic on 29th is always trying to make all the lights, of which there are an abundance. If you're crossing 29th on Vickie, you basically have to climb out of a hole and hope nothing hits you as you crawl across five lanes.

Come to think of it, all the major intersections on Vickie are hazardous. At SE 15th, you must turn: you have to duck under the I-40 overpass for about 800 feet, and wait out at least one, maybe two lights, before you can continue. At Reno, you have a one-way stop sign and a blind spot, and the northbound extension is barely even visible. And at NE 10th, you're fair game for petroleum tankers. (I got crushed by one once, albeit two miles away.)

Back in October, when I was looking to get out of my old apartment, I actually drove the entire length of this street sizing up possible locations. What was I thinking?

As an occasionally-practicing guy, I do have a stash of Hugh Hefner's legendary publication — about twenty years' worth — in the next room, and once a year, by tradition, I review the young ladies who used to have staples in their midsections (Playboy switched to another binding method in the middle 80s), and select one of the twelve for Playmate of the Year.

And then inevitably I watch in bemusement as the magazine selects someone else. It is always thus; last year I noted that I had been wrong twenty times in a row.

I am not even slightly surprised to announce that for "twenty", you should now read "twenty-one"; my source deep within the Mansion even asked for my World Series picks, with the stated intention of betting on anyone I didn't select. (Red Sox over the Cubs in six, in case you want to do likewise.)

Of course, I know far more about baseball than I know about women, but you could replace "baseball" with just about anything from aardvarks to zymurgy and the statement would be no less accurate.

Reader and blogger Phil Dennison is a comer and a goer in a six-man band, or would be were it not for the fact that said band in fact contains two women and four men.

Be that as it may, The Fragments, based in northern Virginia, play that sort of jangly pop that charms those of us who remember antiquities like melody and repels those surly folk who see music as a tool to increase their snarliness. They've made some, um, fragments available for download, and what I hear is solid post-garage stuff, somewhere on the continuum between Carolyne Mas and Rachel Sweet, too sharp for bubblegum but not all that Stiff either, basic 4/4 that sticks because you still believe it after all these years. If I ever outgrow this sort of music, go ahead and nail down the lid.

From the tattered notebook of Kimberly Swygert:

Actually, I think what Ashcroft finds most frightening is the possibility that binomials, even (yes!) polynomials, might be accepted as legitimate equations.

Apparently not everyone on the Left has hopped on the let's-bash-Condi bandwagon. From The People's Republic of Seabrook:

Most of the criticism of Dr Rice I've seen has not been particularly racial in nature, except to the extent that any black American public figure who doesn't toe the Jesse Jackson / Congressional Black Caucus line can expect to be criticized.

But I believe we will do better than this, eventually. In fact, I'm counting on it.

No prospect is more daunting, I maintain, than meeting up, thirty-five years later, with your first love — and this applies no less when the object of your devotion is purely fictional.

Just over a year ago, I said this:

Indeed, the film did not play here in the hinterlands at all, and when the DVD was released in December, I ignored it for two months, contrived somehow to have it back-ordered for two months, and when it finally arrived this week, I stared at it for two days, almost afraid to pop the seal, lest all the connections I've made to the book all these years might be disrupted somehow by the visuals. Finally, late last night, I worked up the nerve and started the disc, promising myself I would not spend four minutes out of every five looking for insignificant yet pickable nits.

I'm not writing a detailed review here — for that, I recommend this piece by Seattle's Three Imaginary Girls — but I must state for the record that whatever fears I may have had were unfounded. The castle itself is just what I envisioned; the countryside is classically beautiful (Wales and the Isle of Man stand in for Suffolk); and the cast is well-nigh perfect. It's a talky sort of film, but then these are people who have a lot to say. And Romola Garai brings Cassandra to life in a way I wouldn't have thought possible: not a girl, not yet a woman, struggling with both the cerebral and the hormonal but sworn to do the Right Thing come what may, this is the character for whom I fell so hard so many years ago.

Mere nostalgia? Hardly. In the grand scheme of things, one's first love ranks second among the most important romantic relationships of a lifetime — one's last love, of course, is the first — and Cassandra Mortmain, confused yet resolute, completely fictional yet utterly real to me, contributed as much as anyone to the structure of my life. And in one way, the film version improves on that structure; the book closes with nine words, a triplet spoken thrice, while the film ends with eight: "I love, I have loved, I will love." If the ending is not technically happy, it's not technically the ending, either.

Dodie Smith's book was published in 1948, the same year that C. B. Warr directed the construction of the house which today is mine, a reminder, to me anyway, that what we are doesn't start with when we're born. And life itself is much like I Capture the Castle: even when it's carefully plotted, it's still vaguely out of control. Heady lessons at fifteen; still viable at fifty.

There are good and sensible reasons why radio stations quit using cart machines, but like the 8-track decks they superficially resemble, I find them fascinating. (The world today may be digital; some of us remain unrepentantly analog in our thinking.)

Radio guy John Quincy had a spare machine and a bright idea, and he took both to a custom lamp manufacturer, with highly illuminating results:





Now is that cool or what?

From the blog of Congressman Brad Carson (D-OK 2), currently running for the Senate seat being vacated by the retiring Don Nickles:

Heh.

This might have carried more weight had not the Carson people sent out an email whine about it, which Bill Quick reprinted:

Observes Quick:

Two and a half years ago, a link didn't have any intrinsic value, really; now that blog advertising is a reality, and a fairly lucrative one for some bloggers, one's blogroll is apparently now fair game.

I may have to start working up a disclaimer of sorts.

Oh, and "LEFT WING BERKELEY PROFESSOR" has been circled and sent to the Department of Redundancy Department.

This print ad caught my eye:

There was a price — $72,500 — and an address, and I knew I had to see this place.

This is, after all, a neighborhood I tend to think of as capital-S Scary, and while it's just off a major thoroughfare, it's cut off from most of the rest of the city — the river and a railroad slice through the terrain nearby — and while being somewhat insular in character is probably good for gated communities where houses sell routinely in six figures, it strikes me as less good in a place where six figures could buy five or six houses. (I checked realtor.com; the going rate for the smaller boxes in this neighborhood is a startling $14,000.)

So what do you get for five times as much? The lot is indeed on a corner, though its hugeness is arguable; the house itself is at the point where the exterior is complete and the interior is being finished, and I have no doubt that, given some proper care, this place can live up to its description. Still, I suspect that finding someone willing to spend this much money to live here will be difficult until a lot more new homes are built — or a lot more old ones are torn down. And I have serious qualms about expropriating an entire neighborhood on the off-chance that it can be gentrified.

I mean, this is not much less than I spent for my own "adorable doll house," roughly the same size, in a neighborhood that presumably doesn't strike fear into anyone's heart. And on the way back to my side of town, I sliced through the western edge of Heritage Hills and caught a glimpse of a standard real-estate agent sign with an attached tag: "Just Beautiful." Same tag you could have seen in my yard, in fact, for the brief period between offering and closing. After what I'd seen earlier, though, I wasn't particularly inclined to be smug.

I did, however, manage a sneer while passing a salon which noted on its sign that "sandel season" had arrived, and they were offering a "foot facial." Now I appreciate sandal season more than most, and indeed I've seen some remarkably nice feet this spring, but I don't think there's any way you can stretch any definition of "facial" to cover the services they offer. Not that I'm going to spend the $45 to find out.

Terry Keith Hammond owns a little 6,000-watt FM in Shamrock, Texas, just over the state line on I-40. MonsterFM is moving over one channel, from 92.7 to 92.9, and jumping to 50,000 watts, but if Hammond can help it, he's not staying in Shamrock. Here's why (his story starts in 2002, when he bought the station):

The FCC will not likely approve a move that removes the signal from Shamrock entirely — KBKH is the only station licensed to Shamrock — but the station might be able to relocate to, say, Sayre, Oklahoma, just inside the state line; they would still easily reach Shamrock, they'd be far enough from other stations on this frequency to avoid interference, and they might be able to pick up an audience in Elk City, fifteen miles away.

Were I this guy, I'd be sending off an application to modify the station's license this week. Texans tend to be friendly folk, but some Texans (and, for that matter, some Oklahomans) insist that you do bidness their way or else, and sometimes "else" is the better choice.

A logo for the proposed New York City Olympics in 2012:

I like it. But Skip Perry asks, quite reasonably:

Dylan doing spots for Victoria's Secret? It was so foretold nearly four decades ago, by Zimmerman himself. Paul Bryant reports to the Spectropop list:

But he was so much older then; he's younger than that now.

Srah has been blogging for almost two and a half years, and she wonders if maybe the well is running dry:

And miss a train wreck? Never. Why, I might want to blog about it.

Slightly more seriously: I've been known to repeat myself — what's more, I've been known to repeat myself — but it's always a new day every morning, even if it sucks just as badly as the previous [fill in number of consecutive sucky days]. Besides, think of the nasty mail you'll get if you don't post anything.

About twice a year, someone has the temerity to ask me why I would think any of the pop songs I grew up with could possibly have any relevance today. And my answer is always the same: I turn to the shelf, pull down Scepter 1211, then start the turntable. An opening perilously close to lounge music, and then Shirley Owens, somewhere between wistful and wanton:

This was the first composition for Brill Building publisher Don Kirshner by Carole King (music) and Gerry Goffin (lyrics), and as the story goes, it was first offered to Johnny Mathis; Columbia Records boss Mitch Miller is said to have blackballed the song, claiming it was immoral.

Dawn Eden might think ol' Mitch may have been on to something:

If it's encouraged for women, it's almost mandatory for men; a woman who is not sexually active is pitied, while a man who is not sexually active is mocked and ridiculed. (Which may be one reason why very few men — Frankie Valli is one who did — ever recorded this song.) "Tell me now, and I won't ask again" turns out to be a variation on a theme by Scarlett O'Hara: "I'll think about that tomorrow."

And, says Dawn, "if you have to ask someone if they'll still love you tomorrow, they don't love you tonight."

I still love this song, and always will. But if you thought it was just an innocuous pop tune from forty years ago, you might want to think again. "Will You Love Me Tomorrow" contains the seeds of the sexual revolution — and, perhaps inevitably, the counterrevolution as well.

The US Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration — and who knew we had one of those? — reports that one in every ten Oklahomans suffers from some form of mental illness.

Sometimes I think the other nine enjoy it.

The other day (well, Sunday, actually) I expressed the opinion that an unnamed Oklahoma City neighborhood was capital-S Scary. Over in San Francisco, Bill Quick lives in a neighborhood that some people regard that way, but he's not the least bit fearful:

Methinks I doth protest too much, or at the very least too early.

The neighborhood I lived in before the acquisition of Surlywood seemed to be following the same path that leads "over the top of the hill," likely for the very same reasons. Certainly we had no shortage of subsidized tenants, and the crime rate spoke for itself. But I don't have any figures for, um, Scarytown, so it's possible I might be unreasonably maligning the area.

Still, when I mentioned it to some coworkers, most of them visibly shuddered.

Once again, John McCain says no, and the Baseball Crank finds the very suggestion absurd:

Maybe if McCain promised to work for the repeal of McCain-Feingold — no, wait, that's not going to happen either.

I have no idea who's the frontrunner in John Kerry's Veepstakes at the moment, but for all the difference it's going to make, he might as well go ahead and pick Dominique de Villepin and hope that the Dithering Classes think he's putting a woman on the ticket: as the Crank notes, "What percentage of America's voting public is aware that Wesley Clark and Richard Clarke are not the same person?"

It's been an instructive day in blogdom. Just today, I've learned:

• Moonbattery is symmetrical;

• Democrats party like it's 1979;

• One of blogdom's leading trolls apparently has an even less-distinguished past;

• The Arkansas/Oklahoma line is not only porous but mutually beneficial in economic terms.
  

And they say I'm wasting my time with this blog stuff.

Boi from Troy brings you the Carnival of the Vanities, live from beautiful downtown West Hollywood. Not only do you get a tour of blogdom's finest, but BfT shows you some of the sights of that mysterious land between L.A. and Beverly Hills, where Sunset became the Strip. It's a place of endless fascination, but then, so is the blogosphere. (And I have an entry this week, but read it anyway.)

In case you were wondering, the President's game plan appeared in his very first sentence after "Good evening":

Translation: "The important stuff first, then it's your turn."

No wonder the media get huffy with Mr Bush; he doesn't treat them with the deference they think they deserve.

The transcript is here.

Barry the Sooner Skeptic contemplates the Democrats' "misery index," and proposes an alternative:

Let's just hope it ends on Election Day.

As in "If you don't like the weather...."

This morning's low was 34, entirely too close to freezing for me and the irises and the forget-me-nots.

As I write, it is now 72 and "breezy," an Oklahoma term which means "Wear a longer skirt next time, dummy."

(Not that you should, you know.)

Or worse; MultiCultural Radio Broadcasting, which owns the nascent network's Chicago and Los Angeles outlets, has dropped their programming.

Wonkette (yeah, I know) reports that MultiCultural claims Air America owes them around $1 million, and bounced a check in the process, a story probably leaked to her about ten minutes after Drudge got it.

You'd think Democrats would understand deficits, wouldn't you?

(Update, 4:15 pm: Commenter Mark at Outside the Beltway explains: "They used Dean's campaign people to manage their money...")

Sometimes you just shake your head in disbelief. And if you don't, well, I do.

I'm looking at my Visa statement. Now it should be a surprise to no one that credit-card issuers will do almost anything legal — some of them have actually gone beyond legal — to improve the take. (The fine print on the back of this statement says baldly, "We will allocate your payments and credits in a way that is most favorable to us.") What happened here falls into the category of "legal but kinda silly."

As it happens, I owed no finance charge at my usual rate, the result of careful juggling of promotional schemes, but there was $3.77 remaining on a previous balance transfer, which, charged at 5.99 percent annually, works out to one cent of finance charge.

Except that there is a minimum finance charge of $1 for any month where there is any finance charge at all, so I was duly charged a buck for my $3.77 balance, and the legally-required disclosures pointed out helpfully that this works out to an effective annual percentage rate of 322.72 percent.

Ah, well. Life is like that. Next time I should do the math a month in advance, eh?

If you saw that title and immediately thought of the US Senate, go to the foot of the class with Richard N. Rosenfeld, who argues in the May Harper's for the abolition of the upper chamber.

Vent #385 takes exception. Several of them, in fact.

An examiner for the Oklahoma Public Employees Retirement System has informed former senator Gene Stipe that the forfeiture of 78 percent of his legislative pension is justified by Stipe's guilty pleas in federal court, which constitute a violation of his oath of office.

The examiner's findings will be passed to the OPERS board for a final ruling.

A new survey reveals that the majority of American taxpayers are aware that the Internal Revenue Service accepts major credit cards, but few are willing to put their tax balances on plastic because of the fees charged (usually 2 to 3 percent).

This really isn't too surprising: if you're facing a $1200 payment, coming up with an extra thirty bucks isn't going to make you feel any better, even if you've got a twenty-day grace period on your MasterCard. The survey suggests that the IRS, should they want greater use of plastic, should follow the lead of real merchants and pay the cost of card processing themselves, billing the $1200 and then collecting $1170 or so from their card service. I have serious doubts, though, that the Treasury will consider such a thing.

Perhaps of the century, at least so far:

I never doubted it for a moment.

Thank you, Michele.

The Festival of the Arts in downtown Oklahoma City, which runs Tuesday through Sunday, is, well, pretty darn festive, what with scores of artists (figure 150 or so) plying their wares and four stages for live events.

It is literally in the street: specifically, Hudson Avenue south of Sheridan, between Stage Center and the Crystal Bridge. And there will be dancers, singers, actors, musicians, and every sort of nosh from pork-chop sandwiches to cedar-plank grilled salmon to, um, tequila bread pudding.

About the only question is when (not if) it will rain. This is spring in Oklahoma, after all. But the Festival, even dripping wet, draws around 700,000 people over its five-and-a-half-day run. In recent years there has been some rumbling to the effect that it may have gotten too big, that it draws big-name artists from elsewhere in the country at the expense of the locals, but I suspect the buyers are less concerned with where a given piece comes from than with how it will look in the living room.

I've missed the last couple of Festivals. This cannot be allowed to happen again.

H. Allen Smith wrote often about writers and their occasional foibles, and one of the writers he memorialized was a chap with the improbable name of Castro Tinklepaugh who was working on a series about Native Americans on the prairie, somehow got sidetracked halfway through, and wound up doing what may be the definitive study of cerumen among the indigenous people of the continent.

Cerumen, in case you missed Grossology, is more commonly known as earwax.

And sometimes, though I admit I hadn't noticed and Dr Tinklepaugh didn't address the issue directly — he was more concerned with viscosity and adhesion — the stuff comes in different colors.

(Via Swirlspice; Erica must be wondering why she ever brought this up in the first place.)

For the first time in years, the entire state of Oklahoma meets the Environmental Protection Agency's 8-hour ground-level ozone standards.

In recent years, parts of the Oklahoma City and Tulsa metropolitan areas have been on the EPA's nonattainment list, although it wasn't because of increased ozone, but because of tighter standards, proposed in 1997 and adopted in 2001 after court challenges.

People who don't suffer from respiratory ailments will likely notice no significant difference, except for the absence of ozone alerts in the media.

Having been warned by hln, I spun some fairly boisterous tunes on today's commute, with the following results:

"Kick Out the Jams", MC5: 14 mph over speed limit
"Happenings Ten Years Time Ago", Yardbirds: 10 mph over
"7 and 7 Is", Love: 9 mph over
"Get Me to the World on Time", Electric Prunes: 7 mph over
"Purple Haze", Jimi Hendrix: 5 mph over
"Sugar and Spice", Cryan' Shames (control): 2 mph over

I'm thinking that on the next road trip, Enya stays home.

Which they didn't, but what the heck.

The Triple-A Oklahoma RedHawks dropped their home opener at the Brick in front of about 11,500 fans. Omaha's Royals won 8-3, and the fireworks display promised for the evening was cancelled due to higher-than-usual winds.

Now 6-3, the 'Hawks remain on top of the Pacific Coast League East division, though they can't expect to stay there if they strand ten runners every night.

The New York Times reports:

"Unbelievable," says Matt at Overtaken by Events.

I believe it just fine. Surely this is the same Justice Diamond who reported receiving threatening letters two years ago, which, said an FBI profiler who paid dues as a detective for the NYPD, were likely written by Diamond herself, perhaps in an effort to justify an expanded security detail. I have to think that if she actually did come up with a scheme like that, she can come up with a justification for any injunction imaginable.

First, let's get the terminology under control, with the help of George Carlin:

Not because she needs help or anything, The Girl Formerly Known As Aldahlia has obtained a copy of The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, and she is, to put it mildly, not impressed.

I don't get as many Free AOL! discs as I used to, which I attribute to having moved and therefore having left some mailing lists behind. This is clearly not an option open to most people, but I have tended to shrug off the invasion: how hard is it to toss the offending wheel of polycarbonate into the circular file?

Enter, stage left, Lori Hancock, a member of the California Assembly (of course), a Democrat (natch) from Berkeley (where else?), who has introduced a bill to require that discs from AOL and its rivals include self-addressed, stamped envelopes to return the unused discs to the sender or, alternatively, to a recycling facility.

AOL, desperate for subscribers, will undoubtedly be appalled at this measure; California, perhaps anxious to preserve landfill space, might actually approve it in the name of holy environmentalism. I'm inclined to support the bill, if only because it would annoy AOL; there is poetic justice in the idea that the carpet-bombing marketroids from AOL might be sentenced to 1000 free hours of community service. And really, there's no middle ground here, unless you want to use the discs for skeet.

Oh, Kimberly Anne, where are you when we need you?

In 1964, the Mar-Keys, who had scored one of the first hits for the Satellite (later Stax) label with the ferocious yet laid-back "Last Night", failed to make any chart noise with their single "Bush Bash" (Stax 156).

Forty years later, it occurs to me: In the unlikely event that this record — an instrumental, in case you were wondering — should be played on the radio, does it qualify as a political statement subject to election laws?

Chris Bopst, no friend of the current Administration, apparently did play this record on his Richmond radio show one day last month. I don't think it's likely he got any negative feedback for so doing — I certainly wouldn't have given him any — but I'm wondering (since I missed the station stream) just how he introduced the tune.

I may have moved across town, but I still have my hair done (to the extent that you can call it "hair", and to the extent that what happens to it qualifies as "done") at the same old eastside location, so today I had to plunge into the Land of What Used To Be.

And indeed, a lot has changed over there in a matter of weeks: a flea market has moved into the shell of a K mart; the hardware store formerly next to Target has relocated one mile west, perhaps hinting at an expansion of Target itself; the most recent grocer to try to make a go of it at 15th and Vickie has given up; and the parking lot at the mall was 80 percent empty. I am reasonably certain that my absence has affected mall traffic not a whit, but still it's sort of dispiriting, and I dawdled over there as little as possible. (I did, however, gas up, since the Evil Orange Pump indicator was starting to flicker and the price was a penny less than my usual station, saving me one bit.)

On the return trip — different route, as per my usual habit — I saw this sign posted at a software store offering a seminar on virus infections: "In God We Trust. All Others We Scan."

Donna may seem apolitical, but she has a cause:

Given her level of determination, we can probably say goodbye to fast-talking, slow-walking, good-looking Mohel Sam.

Then again:

In thirty years, it might even be possible to reassign their sex on the fly, so to speak.

Talk-show host Jay Severin at Boston's FM talker WTKK has been informed that he will no longer be allowed to use the euphemism "effing".

What, if anything, can we do about those corksoaking iceholes at the FCC?

(Via Jeff Jarvis)

So-called "public-service announcements," says Myria, are "a boil on the ass of society paid for mostly by your tax dollars," and it's not hard to see why:

Not a chance. If we discourage people from having sex, the terrorists have won.

And have you ever noticed that there always seems to be a supply of people who will testify in court that they smoked for thirty, forty years and never had the slightest inkling that sticking burning leaves in their mouths might not actually be good for them?

The FCC gives Brownie points to stations for running these things, which is yet another indication of their contempt for the media they regulate and the audiences those media halfassedly attempt to serve.

Rich Appel's Hz So Good newsletter for the coming month opens with a seven-point plan to salvage "oldies" radio, and he has correctly identified the major issue: the core audience is way past the age that advertisers are most desperate to reach. (I turn 51 this year, and am therefore presumably of no interest to anyone except AARP and the manufacturers of Fix-O-Dent.) The fix is radical: the emphasis must be shifted away from us Persons of Mature Flatulence and toward building a new audience in the 18-34 demographic. And this means killing the ersatz Bill Drake noises in the background and abandoning the "we're the station you grew up with" imaging. If this music has lasting value, and I think it does, then it can be sold to new generations without having to pay tribute to those of us who fancy ourselves as having been there at the creation; surprisingly many of today's twenty-year-olds may be Beatles fans, as a recent Entertainment Weekly feature suggested, but it's not necessary for them to be exposed to Murray the K for them to grasp the Zeitgeist.

And given the sheer diversity of Top 40 radio in its prime — if a record charted high enough in the trade papers, it was a candidate for airplay regardless of its perceived genre — there's inevitably going to be conflict in putting together a playlist for the very model of a modern oldies station: some will prefer a heavier marbling of R&B, while others will lean towards whiter, brighter waxings, and what do you do with the country crossovers? One thing, however, is for certain: you can't encapsulate a decade and a half of incredibly diverse music by a mere 200 or 300 songs, as today's stations persist in thinking.

Maybe I shouldn't care about these things. If I have the urge to hear songs from this era, I need only walk into the next room and select stuff from the shelf. But I have just enough semi-enlightened self-interest to believe that if there's an increasing interest in material from the period, the gatekeepers will be more likely to open up the vaults and turn loose some of the things I've forgotten or I've never heard at all. And as John Lennon once said, you know that can't be bad.

Say it again: Murrah.

It's a mere slip of a word, a syllable and a half, barely enough for a murmur.

And on an April morning in 1995, its innocuousness was forever laced with toxins: number-two diesel fuel, ammonium nitrate, shrapnel, the very smell of death.

It is still not entirely certain whether the Oklahoma City bombing was a purely domestic operation, or if there might have been a foreign component to the conspiracy. But either way, the results were the same, and a hundred sixty-eight empty chairs stand downtown to give mute testimony to those results.

Spring in Oklahoma often brings us disasters. On this very date in 1970, the Chikaskia River, after three days of rain, rose three to six feet from its banks and washed away much of the town of Jefferson. In May 1999, tornadoes pushing the limits of the Fujita scale rolled through the Oklahoma City metropolitan area. The response is always the same: we take care of business, we mourn, we clean up, and we go on, because — well, because that's what we do.

I don't know if this is the stuff of which movies are made, but inevitably someone will try, and chances are there will be a title like Terror in the Heartland attached to it, a title that might attract attention on the bottom shelf at Blockbuster but which ultimately says nothing at all. Besides, if you were here on the 19th of April, 1995, as I was, as Jan was, you already have a name for it.

Murrah.

Now playing in the hearts and minds of a community that will always remember, and will always go on.

Because that's what we do.

(Update, 1:30 pm: Lynn S. and Michele have thoughts on the events of this day.)