This Caren Lissner story can't possibly be excerpted, so:

Now if we could just remind the politically illiterate that Prohibition was the dumbest thing ever.

The WB's Superstar USA, says Donna, is "immensely evil":

Inasmuch as I've never been impressed by anyone I've seen on American Idol, not even William Hung, I rather doubt I'll be paying much attention to this batch of sub-karaoke warblers, and I thank Donna for doing the dirty work for me.

Before Freddie cuts in — he does that constantly, you know — here's the chorus:

Hard to imagine that Hal David, wordsmith for such eloquent songs as "Do You Know the Way to San Jose?" and "Don't Make Me Over," would ever have come up with something like that, but hey, it was 1962, and you can't do everything with Burt Bacharach at your side. And besides, Sherman Edwards' melody is perfectly tailored to a (presumably) teenage singer to whom angst is more important than range.

Joanie Sommers (née Joan Drost) was actually twenty, but no matter: she had Sweet Sixteen all over her lovely face. I know this because right in front of me, I've got a copy of the original sheet music for "Johnny Get Angry," published by Tod Music, Inc., and the reason I have this is because Dawn Eden, who has a smile even bigger than Joanie's, was kind enough to send it along as part of her effort to reduce her volume of pop ephemera from "Crushing" to "Overwhelming."

Thanks, Dawn. If I never seem to wish that I were dead anymore, it's at least partially because of you.

Somehow this just struck me as hilarious. The Bare Buns Family Nudist Club in northern Virginia has a collection of Frequently Asked Questions, and most of them are pretty much like the questions asked of other clothing-optional operations.

Except for this one:

I can't wait for this to come up in a Congressional hearing. "Yes, Senator, I did remove all my clothing, at an undisclosed location."

One of the signon screens at AOL last night screamed GAS PRICES AT RECORD HIGHS. Of course, if you apply an inflation adjustment, it would take prices around $3 a gallon to qualify for the "record," but even apart from that matter of economics and/or semantics, the price at the pump has dropped five or six cents here on the Lone Prairie; prices as low as $1.72 have been sighted around town. (Independent reports can be found here.)

This doesn't mean the worst is over by any means, but the AOL report does suggest that Big Media is more interested in scaring up a story by scaring its customers — which, these days, scarcely qualifies as news.

"Dangerously vague," said Judge Phyllis Hamilton when she ruled that last year's "partial-birth" abortion ban is unconstitutional.

True Blue Gal Deb reprints the pertinent legal language, and wants to know what's so vague about it. And Judge Hamilton also objected to the absence of an exception to save the health of the mother. Saving her life, of course, is covered in the first paragraph, but I suppose it's necessary to protect her self-esteem and her emotional stability as well.

I fail to see how anyone, with the possible exception of Scott Peterson, benefits from this ruling.

Cam Edwards asks:

1.  Yes.

2.  There are two ways in which the government has contributed to improving my existence: tax policies that put a few extra coins in my pocket, and foreign policies that put the interests of this country above the interests of the soi-disant "international community."

How's that?

"How very strange," muttered Simon and/or Garfunkel, "to be seventy."

They'll get there fast enough. Meanwhile, Dear Old Dad goes ten percent beyond, turning seventy-seven today, and while it would be starry-eyed in the extreme to say he's in the best of health, he doesn't seem to be deteriorating much, either.

Still, I worry. Emphysema has turned his lungs into a wasteland, and he's tethered to an oxygen source. He can walk fairly well, sometimes better than I can, but he can't walk very much, simply because that plastic lifeline will only go so far. And while he wasn't a traveling sort of fellow — maybe all those years in the service took the Wanderlust out of him — it's hard for me to accept the fact that he'll likely spend the rest of his life in those same three or four rooms.

What matters, though, is that there is a "rest of his life"; with Mom gone twenty-seven years now, and the surviving children spread across town, he's the unmistakable center of the family, and were it up to me, he'd stay there as long as possible.

And he has one secret weapon: the woman he married after a decent interval of widowerhood, who is still by his side and always will be. I pretend to chafe at having a stepmother my own age, but I have no doubt that without her, he'd never have lasted this long.

To both of them, I raise my glass, and towards the sky, I raise my hopes.

In Oklahoma parlance, an Eighty-Niner is someone who was actually on hand for the Land Run on 22 April 1889, which resulted in the founding of Oklahoma City. More recently, the name was applied to the city's minor-league baseball club, which is now known as the RedHawks.

And blogwise, the 89er is the 89th edition of Carnival of the Vanities, hosted this week by Read My Lips, seven days' worth of superior bloggage in a single handy package. Even if it is in Texas.

Once again, you know the words:

Actually, Harry Chapin placed this station in Boise, Idaho, where stations whose call letters start with W are conspicuous by their absence, but no matter: the real WOLD, a daytimer in Marion, Virginia on 1330 kHz, has, according to 100000watts.com, gone silent pending a sale.

WOLD-FM (102.5 MHz) continues.

For its first three-quarters of a century, the City of Oklahoma City managed to get by without an official seal. In 1965, Mayor George Shirk announced a competition to design a city seal; this is the prize winner, designed by Larry Thompson, who got $500 (a fair chunk of change in '65) for his efforts.

Now how long will it take the American Civil Liberties Union to decide that the white perpendicular bars in the center constitute a cross?

"Partly cloudy," said the Weather Guys, and so it was, but I figured enough stray rays were filtering into my back yard to justify grabbing a few, and so I did.

Away from the street, it's fairly quiet; the first noise I heard was the sound of a dozen birds taking off once they heard the back door opening. Well, fine, be that way, I thought; normally they tend to sit there and stare, or if they sense that yard work is about to be performed, they wait for some fresh surfaces to explore, but generally they don't split all at once.

In the absence of flapping wings — their chirping session usually ends around sunrise — I tuned into some of the other noises around: the high-pitched buzz of the resident insects, the wind (down around 8 mph, which is way low for here) rustling the leaves above me, air conditioners cycling on and off, and the occasional passing vehicle with the stereo turned up to a Spinal Tap-like eleven.

Then there was that loud crashing noise from a house on the next block, which definitely broke the mood of the moment and left me wondering if maybe I'd stayed out just a few seconds too long. Nothing — at least, nothing on this side of the fence — lasts forever.

Robb Hibbard has permalinks at last!

And to commemorate this august (though it be June) moment, a list of his criteria for moviegoing:

Somehow I suspect his DVD shelf has far more diversity than mine.

Politicians do love to count jobs, and it's always amusing to see their counts come back and bite them.

Senate candidate Kirk Humphreys has been boasting that 54,000 jobs were created in Oklahoma City during his stint as mayor; his press secretary has since conceded that this figure is inaccurate.

The correct number, says Rick Buchanan, is 38,000.

The correct number, says the Bureau of Labor Statistics, is 16,332; if you add in the entire metropolitan area, you can get to 38,000, but it's unclear to me how Humphreys, as mayor of Oklahoma City, contributed a great deal to job growth in Shawnee or Norman.

Every day is a learning experience, or ought to be, and here's what I'm finding out:

• The American Sign Language gestures for words relating to "abortion" involve the portrayal of something being thrown away.

• It is apparently possible to stage Shakespeare with an all-female cast.

• Some 80 percent of spam is sent by machines hijacked by Trojan-horse infections.

• Not everyone in Bolivia is happy with the country's Miss Universe candidate, who inexplicably turns out to be a tall, English-speaking white woman.

• Fifty Avon brochures weigh as much as a small child.

• Gamma radiation is a bitch.

No other description needed:

Cicada-chip cookies.

(Via Fark)

Well, somebody's getting a break at the pumps: the price in Iraq is running around five cents a gallon for the cheap stuff these days.

Iraq being short of refinery capacity at the moment, the US government is buying gas in the region at around a buck-fifty and delivering it to filling stations at further expense. I assume they figure they'll make up the difference in volume.

From CaribPundit comes this story of a movement in Guyana to raise the age of consent, currently twelve, following the attempt of a 37-year-old businessman to marry a 13-year-old girl over the objections of her mother.

This hit me harder than I thought it would, and I know why. About ten years ago, I had a pen pal of 14 or so; we were both fans of Roundhouse, a comedy-plus-music series that aired on Nickelodeon for three years. I still have a photo of her somewhere. But it would never have occurred to me to visit her, let alone try to lure her into the sack. (The show was eventually cancelled, we fell out of touch, and surely she's forgotten me by now.)

This is undoubtedly related to the vaguely-creepy feeling I get these days from the Playmate of the Month, who almost always proves to be younger than either of my children. Maybe I'd feel differently if I'd been brought up in Guyana, but I doubt it.

I'm whipping down the Lake Hefner Parkway at the speed that was legal half a mile ago fercryingoutloud, and the Blossoms, Darlene Love and all, pop up on the speakers with the 1961 semi-hit "Son-In-Law," a smart-alecky response to Ernie K-Doe's enormous hit "Mother-In-Law," which goes something like this:

Exactly the person, in other words, who might muse, "If she would leave, that would be the solution." "Son-In-Law" stalled at #79 in Billboard, which is actually pretty good for an example of that now-forgotten genre, the answer record, the song that takes note of the plaintiff's top-charting plea and details the case for the defense.

Most of the time, it's obvious what's being answered, as it is with Wendy Hill's "Gary, Please Don't Sell My Diamond Ring." Seldom did answer records chart very high, though Jeanne Black's "He'll Have to Stay," which refutes Jim Reeves' "He'll Have to Go," made #4.

But for the greatest answer record of them all, we have to reorient ourselves toward early-Fifties country music, and a fellow named Hank Thompson, who besides selling sixty million-odd records, starred in the first-ever TV variety show in color (live from Oklahoma City, even) and recorded the first-ever country live album (At the Golden Nugget, 1961).

Thompson's signature song, a tremendous hit in 1952, was "The Wild Side of Life." He didn't write it — Jimmy Heap and the Melody Masters put it out a couple years earlier — but Thompson made it his own. It contained this chorus:

Songwriter J. D. Miller saw an opening here, and Kitty Wells was coaxed out of semi-retirement to hurl Hank Thompson's words back at him:

A situation that has changed little in half a century, I might add. "It Wasn't God Who Made Honky Tonk Angels" sold a million, a first for a female country artist, and a rare example (well, rare before Loretta Lynn) of a woman in Nashville actually talking back. And just to make a point, Kitty followed it with an answer to Webb Pierce's "Back Street Affair."

The answer record has largely been supplanted over the years by the tribute recording, often overlaid with entirely too much attempted irony: see Dread Zeppelin, or Rolf Harris' attempt to tie down "Stairway to Heaven." Which means we probably won't hear a 21st-century equivalent of, say, Jon E. Holliday's "Yes, I Will Love You Tomorrow," which isn't the least bit amusing, or the Romeos' "The Tiger's Wide Awake," which is.

(Note: There were a couple of MP3s linked here; they were taken down after 36 hours to avoid the wrath of the Recording Industry Association of America, which objects strenuously to this sort of thing, even when the recordings are not available commercially and likely never will be.)

Rest in peace, Mr. President.

On the marquee at La Baguette, a French restaurant a couple miles from me:

They didn't need to say anything else.

After ten years, the Metropolitan Area Projects Citizens Oversight Board is ready to close the books. The once-fractious board voted to put itself out to pasture this week.

MAPS itself was remarkable: a single, massive upgrade of public facilities, financed by a one-cent sales tax for 5½ years. When MAPS was put to the voters in 1993, the city suggested that the projects would spur some $150 million in private investment; during the period the tax was collected, revenues and accrued interest totaled over $350 million, and the private sector so far has kicked in around $1.5 billion. In a city previously considered somewhere between sleepy and moribund, this is a turnaround on par with the '69 Mets.

One worry I had was that things were going to cost even more than the city had projected and the entire scheme was going to wind up in the hole. The final financial report shows about $450,000 still in the kitty, which will be devoted to project upkeep. And that penny sales tax expired in 1999; voters were sufficiently impressed with the results it got to reinstate it in 2001 for "MAPS for Kids", a scheme to upgrade public school facilities in the city, which is projected to cost some $620 million, 70 percent of which will go to schools within the Oklahoma City school district and the balance to schools in suburban districts which serve outlying parts of the city.

I could be cynical and ask what they're going to do in 2008 when the MAPS for Kids tax expires — surely they'll think of something, right? — but for now, I'm waiting to see whether the improvement in facilities is enough to jump-start the process of improving the quality of education.

I know this feeling — well, some of it, anyway — all too well:

There are no entries here which deal with women I've dated, because there are no such women, at least since this site opened in 1996. But there are plenty of items which for one reason or another make me cringe: really badly-argued premises, bathetic whining, desperate attempts at bandwagon-jumping. Were I anxious to make a good impression, I'd scythe away the lot of them.

But I don't. I can't. For better or for worse, this is the document of my existence, the one reference work by which I measure what progress (if any) I have made, and stripping it of things which might embarrass me will inevitably reduce its usefulness in conducting those measurements. Of more than three thousand pages that have accumulated on this site over eight years, I have deleted a total of four, and those four not only had essentially no redeeming social value whatever but could have made life difficult for other people as well.

And if by some fluke I do actually date someone, I'll post about it. Just don't hold your breath waiting.

Joanne Jacobs points to this story in The New York Times Magazine which details the semi-detached suburban sexual encounters of contemporary teenagers, and there's something vaguely, maybe not so vaguely, impersonal about the entire process:

I rather think Dawn Eden might disagree with that last bit.

And Dr. Drew Pinsky, he who hosts the "Loveline" show, sees a downside, particularly for girls:

And what the boys wanted, when I was growing up, could be graphed on a baseball diamond. No more:

I don't know. (Third base.)

AmeriDebt, a credit-counseling operation which ran massive advertising campaigns before running afoul of the Federal Trade Commission, has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy. The firm, which stopped acquiring new customers last fall, is continuing to serve its existing customer base; at least five states have filed suit against them, charging that AmeriDebt misrepresented its services.

I knew I was in trouble when I managed to miss completely the third page of disclosures and whatever on the clipboard.

But I put that out of my mind, shed everything metallic, and was duly crammed into the business end of this gargantuan contraption that, had it been colored something other than Industrial Beige, would have fit nicely into an episode of Looney Tunes with music by Raymond Scott.

At first, I shrugged it off. They handed me a pair of headphones, and tuned me into the local classical station, and the processing began.

It did not help that the radio station took this opportunity to introduce us to a Dutch composer about my age who apparently operated under the assumption that the real problem with Schönberg was that he was too goddamn melodic. And I'm lying here on too narrow a slab — yeah, yeah, I know — trying desperately not to twitch while my synapses are playing a suite from Herrmann's score for Psycho.

The station switched to Mozart, and it didn't help. By now my pulse was in triple digits, and I would have been sweating profusely had not every drop of liquid in my body, with the exception of the quart that had mysteriously backed up in the bladder, been diverted to relieving a mouth dry as the Mojave. Four or five or a hundred and twenty passes — who knew? — and I was literally screaming yet somehow still inaudible: "GET ME OUT OF THIS THING!"

In 1985, a petroleum tanker drove over the top of my car. By comparison, I took that calmly.

They say that fear eats the soul. I'd be really surprised if there's enough left for a snack.

About 3,000 Oklahoma City utility customers got an unpleasant surprise this month in their water/sewer/garbage bills: $581.84 listed as "Balance In Dispute." I got the impression, talking to the harried but sort-of-smiling clerk, that 2,900 or so of them had called in today to complain.

She did say that it was safe to ignore it, but if I went ahead and paid it, they wouldn't complain a whole lot. I suppose they wouldn't, inasmuch as $581.84 (it's the same amount on all the affected bills) is about a year's worth of service at this address.

(Update, 8 June, 4:50 pm: The City is now claiming 10,000 bills were so affected.)

The Cornerstone Baptist Church in Stafford, Virginia lacks something you'd think might be essential to a congregation of this denomination: a proper baptismal pool. Previously, they had been borrowing the facilities of other churches in the area. But Rev. Todd Pyle, ever-resourceful, hit upon a solution, and one with Biblical antecedent at that: hold baptisms in the Rappahannock River, at the Falmouth Waterfront Park.

Officials at the park were less than delighted, and tried to break up the ceremony, claiming it might be offensive to others using the park.

Perhaps surprised by the level of outrage their action generated — including objections from the Virginia-based Rutherford Institute and the state branch of the ACLU [link is to a Microsoft Word document] — park officials promised to reevaluate their policies. Meanwhile, Rev. Pyle is looking for another place to conduct the ceremony.

(Via Tongue Tied)

Okay, maybe not that much. But Oklahoma is riven with fault lines, and they vibrate fairly frequently; yesterday, an hour and a half before sunset, a 3.0 temblor (temblette?) rumbled its way through Ardmore.

The most earth-shattering quake ever recorded in Oklahoma struck El Reno in 1952.

Apparently the question of whether Oklahoma City has enough downtown hotel rooms has been settled: the Big 12 Conference announced today that the 2007 basketball tournaments will be held in OKC, the women's in the Cox Convention Center, the men's in the Ford Center.

Why Michele isn't throwing away her Smiths recordings:

Amen to that. Dixie Chicks, anyone?

(Update, 4:25 pm: More specificity in the opening.)

This started with retroCRUSH's 50 Coolest Song Parts survey, which is based on the perfectly reasonable notion that "sometimes there are pieces of songs that are cooler than the song itself." With a nod to Michele, who's already worked up a list, here are some of my favorite fragments. The criterion for inclusion is simple: does it make the hair on the back of my neck stand up, even now, however many years later? These do.

• The very last line of "Rag Doll," the 4 Seasons (Philips, 1964), in which Frankie Valli proclaims, "I love you just the way you are."

• Hal Blaine's drum break, leading into the outro to the Ronettes' "Be My Baby" (Philles, 1963).

• Roger Daltrey's scream right before "Meet the new boss / Same as the old boss" in the Who's "Won't Get Fooled Again" (Decca, 1971).

• "It doesn't matter what you wear / Just as long as you are there" in "Dancing in the Street", Martha and the Vandellas (Gordy, 1964).

• The second instrumental break (the one without the sound effects) and the outro of the Lovin' Spoonful's "Summer in the City" (Kama Sutra, 1966).

• Jimi Hendrix' extended break in the middle of "All Along the Watchtower" (Reprise, 1970).

• Diana Ross' cries of "I'll always love you" in the outro of the Supremes' "Love Child" (Motown, 1968).

• The interplay of drum and piano after Badfinger sing the title of "Day After Day" (Apple, 1971).

• The a cappella section midway through the Beach Boys' "Sloop John B" (Capitol, 1966).

• Silence, followed by a fierce drum pounding, and then "Came the dawn", twice in "I Had Too Much to Dream (Last Night)" by the Electric Prunes (Reprise, 1966).

• "One, two, three, FOUR!" The Beatles, "I Saw Her Standing There" (Capitol, 1964).

• The ersatz Wall of Sound surrounding T. Rex's "Metal Guru" (Reprise, 1972).

• The stop-time beat right before the invocation of the title, all through Lesley Gore's "That's the Way Boys Are" (Mercury, 1965).

• "At the bottom of this mine lies a big, big man: Big John." Jimmy Dean, "Big Bad John" (Columbia, 1961).

• The six-note riff that opens J. J. Jackson's "But It's Alright" (Calla, 1966).

• "You're so vain / You probably think this song is about you." Carly Simon, "You're So Vain" (Elektra, 1972).

• The plodding, almost sorrowful opening to Jimmy Ruffin's "What Becomes of the Brokenhearted" (Soul, 1966).

• The spooky opening to "With You There to Help Me," the lead track from Jethro Tull's Benefit (Reprise, 1970).

• The fade of the Walker Brothers' "The Sun Ain't Gonna Shine (Anymore)" (Smash, 1966).

• Arthur Alexander's rueful "Every girl I've ever had / Breaks my heart and leaves me sad / What am I, what am I supposed to do?" in "Anna" (Dot, 1962).

• Whatever the hell that is in the middle of the Trashmen's "Surfin' Bird" (Garrett, 1963).
  

Feel free to contribute your own bits.

Screenwriter/librettist Jim Friedland, courtesy of Dawn Eden:

This "no successors" idea explains much about occasional Republican efforts to engrave Ronald Reagan's name on every conceivable flat surface and his image on Mount Rushmore: there is, I've often suspected, an inchoate feeling within the GOP that while there are political victories still within reach, the party has already peaked, and in the absence of Reagan is destined for a slow but inexorable decline.

Of course, this notion ignores the prodigious capacity for self-destruction that exists in the Democratic party, and the fact that the Democrats don't have a Ronald Reagan either. (They did at one time, but they drove him away.)

Still, a "renewed sense of hope and openness" is what Ronald Reagan was all about, and if we can recapture some of that in the wake of his death, we all benefit.

An observation by Justin Katz, posted as a comment to this item:

To some extent, yes. Unfortunately, I wasn't blogging in, say, 1960, and while I made a couple of fitful starts at a journal (don't you dare call it a "diary," even if it is) during the Sixties, nothing much remains; I am left to reconstruct those days from unreliable memory and unrelated ephemera.

It would be nice to have something like this.

No one seemed particularly anxious to accept my nonexplanation of why I wasn't dating, as affixed to this piece, and I can't say I'm especially surprised.

The fact is, whatever ideal I have kicking around in the back of my heart is ill-defined at best; I have a few desiderata that can be translated into words, but after so many years of vague, inchoate yearning, I don't think it's possible for me to be too specific about the object of my halfquarter-hearted quest.

On the other hand, some people know exactly what they're looking for.

The weather station at Will Rogers World Airport reported more rain yesterday than during the entire month of May.

Admittedly, this May was drier than usual, but this is yet another example of the feast-or-famine nature of Oklahoma weather. And the punchline? Even with this deluge, we're still down about 3.5 inches for the year.

And come August, we'll be wondering where all the damn rain went. Count on it.

It's the 90th edition of Carnival of the Vanities, this week hosted by Ambient Irony, and, well, it could be verse. Miss it at your peril.

Serenity wants you to know that just because she's a woman, it doesn't mean she has to, um, take things sitting down.

I am duly impressed, and, as she says, knowledge is power.

In 1956, the Maddox Brothers and sister Rose issued a single called "The Death of Rock and Roll." America's most colorful hillbilly band gone apocalyptic? Not necessarily. After a couple of false starts — okay, half a dozen or so — they get down to business, and it sounds like this:

Not exactly the words of Ray Charles, a year and a half earlier, but it's the same song, and while the collective Maddox tongues were firmly in cheek, they perhaps sensed that their blend of bluegrass and boogie was becoming obsolete, and this was the very stuff that was going to displace it.

Not that "I Got a Woman" was all that auspicious in and of itself. A thinly-disguised rewrite of a gospel song ("There's a Man Goin' Round Takin' Names"), it topped the rhythm and blues chart, but Ray had already been to the Top Five with "It Should've Been Me," a Memphis Curtis number that hewed much more closely to R&B conventions. And the white segment of the nascent rock and roll audience wasn't quite ready for Ray and his rawness and his decidedly non-Pentecostal passion built on gospel chords; it wasn't until 1957 that he got a pop hit, and when he did, it was a reworking of Stephen Foster's "Old Folks at Home," issued as "Swanee River Rock."

After seven years at Atlantic, Ray Charles moved to ABC-Paramount, which promised to leave him alone and to let him keep his own masters, both among the most unheard-of contract provisions anyone had ever heard of. His debut for ABC in 1960 was a remake of Titus Turner's "Sticks and Stones," but Ray had lots of surprises to spring on us. While he'd written most of his own material at Atlantic, from now on he would be looking for previously-recorded songs that he could make his own.

And considerations like musical genre were secondary at best. During 1961, for instance, Ray hit big with "Hit the Road Jack," aimed at the pop market, and "One Mint Julep," an example of big-band jazz cut for ABC's Impulse label. And in 1962, he moved into country music with the seminal Modern Sounds in Country and Western Music album. And while Ray didn't sound particularly country or at all Western — Dave Marsh once asserted that Ray's version of Don Gibson's "I Can't Stop Loving You" was "no more country than The Rite of Spring" — his claim to "modern" is indisputable.

The big hits petered out in the late Sixties, but Ray kept making music because, well, that's what he did. And he never, ever took himself too seriously; in the Eighties he did a series of ads for Pioneer's LaserDisc video system, pointing out that while he couldn't vouch for the picture quality, the sound was superb.

And now he's gone, his liver having given out after 73 years. His soul, in any sense of the word, is eternal.

About one-quarter of the Oklahoma House will have to be replaced this year because of term limits, including Robert Worthen, who has represented District 87, where I live these days.

During the three-day filing period this week, no fewer than seven people filed to run for District 87; only District 19, in the northeast part of the state, drew more.

One of the four Republicans vying for the seat is Young Republicans official Trebor Worthen, who is Robert Worthen's son, and whose first name is "Robert" spelled backwards. Another is Tina Majors, who ran second in the GOP primary in 2002 for Senate District 40. Then there's Reece Kepler, who scores for Best Domain Name: RememberReece.com. I know nothing at all about Karen Khoury.

On the Democratic side, there's David B. Hooten, who may or may not be this David B. Hooten; Steve Harry, who won the Senate District 40 primary in 2002, losing to Cliff Branan in the election; and John Morgan, who owns a small business and who lives around the corner from me.

There's no Senate race here — Cliff Branan's term runs through 2006 — so I get to fixate on a House race this time. The primary will be 27 July (right after World Tour '04), with runoffs if needed on 24 August. So far, the only candidate I've met is John Morgan, who, as noted, lives around the corner from me.

I was in a 49th-birthday funk — fortunately, it's impossible to do that more than once — when I came up with this bit of projection:

I wouldn't have thought about it today except that Lachlan, filling in at suburban blight, reported this ghastly tale:

Lachlan says that in a town the size of Tokyo, this isn't all that surprising, but:

At least I can reasonably expect my absence to be noted within the first week.

Erica is baffled again:

Under the circumstances, the least I can do for her is send her one for testing purposes.

"Does God have a sense of humor?" asks Abigail at Lazy Reflections.

First thought out of my head was "Have you ever seen a platypus? Exhibit A."

But that really doesn't answer her question, nor is it particularly kind to the platypus. (I mean, if I need to see an ungainly creature which seems to be assembled from random parts, I need only pass by a mirror.)

And I think really she's already answered her own question, since she admits to being a fan of P. G. Wodehouse, who, in her words, "uses Biblical imagery in such a way as to make it humorous without a hint of mockery."

I'd also point her to this observation by Dawn Eden:

In the twenty-first century, when rapid-fire gags constitute most of what's considered "humor," this notion may seem almost quaint. Still, if you love paradoxes as much as I do, and I really, truly hate them sometimes, it makes perfect sense.

One last bit: Car and Driver once got a letter from a subscriber — perhaps, now that I think about it, a former subscriber — complaining that the magazine's studied irreverence had gone entirely too far this time. The aggrieved correspondent signed off with: "My God will not be mocked."

The editorial reply: "We wouldn't dream of mocking God. But we'll be damned if He can't take a joke."

Which, I think, pretty much says it all.

Two classic films will be screened during this year's deadCenter Film Festival: Sir Carol Reed's The Third Man and Volker Schlöndorff's The Tin Drum. But Festival buzz is all about the one premiere on the schedule: Banned in Oklahoma, a documentary by Gary D. Rhodes about what happened when some censorious doofus got it into his head that The Tin Drum was obscene and managed to stir up a thoroughly embarrassing cause célèbre that gave Oklahoma City a cultural black eye and a bill for half a million dollars in legal judgments for following the lead of said doofus.

An abridged version of Rhodes' documentary can be had in the Criterion Collection DVD edition of The Tin Drum, but this is the first appearance anywhere of the full 54-minute film.

Bruce works in retail, which gives this observation additional resonance:

I almost always have an explanation for any purchase I make, although sometimes it's as lame as "It made me feel better."

And I wonder if I'd make more such purchases if I had more discretionary income.

Apparently my haphazard attempts at lawn care are at least slightly appreciated; a neighbor informed me that the yard "looks nice," which is far more kindly an evaluation than I'd give to it.

(Mental note: There is a GFCI-type circuit breaker installed in each of the outside electrical outlets. It's much easier to check it, and quite a bit faster, than it is to go poking around the breaker box.)

Seen a couple of blocks away: an Oldsmobile in Classic GM Vanilla, inscribed with the words "VOTE KHOURY," presumably a reference to Karen Khoury, one of the four Republicans seeking the state House seat for this area, which is being vacated this year. I didn't get a look at the driver, inasmuch as I was trying to avoid running over things at the time.

Sign at a restaurant a couple miles north: "BUY DAD SOMETHING HE NEEDS THIS YEAR — A DRINK."

(For Steve Gigl, by request)

File under: "How much is that doggerel in the window?"

Last night's Scary Dream posited the existence of a game show called Fisk This! Each of the three contestants was handed a 100-word paragraph on the State of the World, or something equally lofty and imposing, and then got 60 seconds to explain why everything in it was wrong.

Somehow I had been tapped to write source material for this series, a position I acquired after a brief dalliance with a twisted spinster. (Not the Twisted Spinster, I hasten to add.) And as jobs go, it wasn't too bad, until the season finale, when one of the contestants was the Twisted Spinster, who, rhetorically at least, not only tore me a new one but rerouted all the plumbing to take advantage of it. The producers of the show thought it would be amusing to bring me out in my tattered state, and there was at least one great emotional upheaval, and then the angels of mercy saw fit to drag me out of bed.

I refuse to read any more into this than I have to.

Fourteen states have enacted laws which provide that killing a pregnant woman can result in two charges, one for the woman, one for the child on the way.

An Illinois man is complaining that the law in his state is discriminatory:

Roe v. Wade was cited as a precedent, which did not impress the prosecution:

What I want to know is this: How long before this case turns into promotional material for Planned Parenthood and its friends?

(Via True Blue)

Now that Ashley and Mary-Kate Olsen are, um, legal, McGehee thinks the demand for unclad photos of them will be diminishing.

I have my doubts. In the mind of the Average Perv, "twins" trumps "underage"; if anything reduces the demand, it will be their desire to separate themselves into individuals — lately, interviewers have been asked not to refer to them as a unit — rather than their long-awaited post-jailbait status.

Still, Mary-Kate seems awfully insubstantial for serious fantasy material these days.

Sunrise this morning came at 6:14, which is about as early as it can get around here. Sunset will be at 8:47; over the next week or so, it will slide toward 8:50 before retreating again after the summer solstice.

One of my goals this summer is to banish, at least temporarily, my normal sickly whiter-shade-of-pale coloring. This could be rather easily done by lying in the sun for extended intervals, but there are good and sensible reasons not to do this: apart from the increased threat of melanoma, the medication I take to regulate my blood pressure bears a warning about excessive sun. (I have read the prescribing information on the drug, and the real danger seems to lie in fluid depletion.) With short but concentrated exposures — twenty to thirty-five minutes per day — I seem to be suffering no side effects, and areas that don't get any sun during the work day have gradually darkened from "born gosling" to "underdone pork," which I reckon to be an improvement.

Of course, the single darkest body part will be the left arm, for obvious automotive reasons.

Who could do a convincing version of Queen's "We Are the Champions"?

DragonAttack makes a persuasive case for Ann Wilson or Bruce Dickinson.

But mostly, it should be someone other than William Hung:

Desmond Child, be it noted, cowrote "She Bangs," which was Hung's first, um, hit.

I expect a Mrs. Miller revival any day now.

Senator Joseph Biden (D-DE), on why he's making such a fuss over that "torture" memo:

You might infer from this that Senator Biden has a son in the military, and indeed he does: 1LT Joseph R. "Beau" Biden is serving in the Delaware National Guard as a judge advocate. Unless you think Delaware is some sort of hellhole, the likelihood that Beau Biden is going to be tortured is pretty low, and it doesn't increase much if he gets called up for Iraqi duty.

Still, the Senator's comments were apparently calculated to make people think that Beau was somehow in the line of fire, and indeed the senior Biden backpedaled slightly on Fox News Sunday yesterday:

Now did Biden think up this little deception himself, or did he rewrite someone else's?

(Via Michelle Malkin)

The "Ask the Critic" sidebar in Entertainment Weekly, like most such features, is highly dependent on the quality of the questions asked, and it's probably a good thing we see only one or two questions a week and not the thousands which were thrown away.

Sometimes, though, they strike gold. Asked about a pop-music figure who might deserve a biopic, Owen Gleiberman suggests exactly the one I'd most want to see: Marvin Gaye, played by the comparably-inspiring Taye Diggs. I'm not sure I'm ready for Beyoncé Knowles as Tammi Terrell, but I'll be doggone if Morgan Freeman isn't perfect for the vengeful Marvin, Senior: the showdown between Gaye and his dad (you know the story) should be enough to qualify for Oscar® bait. How sweet it is, indeed.

It's not too common to close a road because of heat, but a stretch of Interstate 40 in Canadian County, near the Kilpatrick Turnpike, was shut down yesterday afternoon because of heat-induced pavement migration.

In other words, holes. Big ones.

I spotted the makings of something similar this morning on I-44: it was as though the concrete had pulled back from the expansion joint, leaving a substantial gap. This stretch of road being fairly bumpy at its best, not everyone is likely to notice, at least at first, though the wankers who fit their workaday sedans with twenty-inch wheels and 35-series tires are in for an increase in their daily ration of jaw-rattling jolts.

(Update, 8:20 pm: There's apparently another one, this time on Lincoln Blvd. near 36th Street. Since my Wednesday route home goes right through this intersection, I think it's time for Plan B.)

Abigail's been given one of those Teen Study Bibles, and she is not impressed with its approach:

It is automatically assumed these days that anyone in this age group is motivated most strongly by snarkiness; a spoonful of smartass, the publishers are sure, makes the eternal verities go down.

This strikes me as counterproductive. What teenagers want more than anything else is to finally get into adulthood, to be what they imagine is "grown up"; when a church is telling you to wallow in your adolescence, it dilutes any other message.

Abigail is smart enough to see this:

Not to mention the dignity of the teens trying to understand it; even if they're getting Scripture intact, the wrappings serve to dumb it down. Were I her age, I think I'd be insulted by a package like this.

Lynn doesn't see anything wrong with guys wearing sandals, at least in a casual context. Fair enough, I suppose, since there are substantial periods of time when that's all I'm wearing, and you can't get much more casual than that.

Well, yeah, okay, there's the wristwatch. Big deal. It's a Casio and it's twenty-five years old. I've now spent more on batteries than I did buying the darn thing in the first place. And it keeps fairly lousy time, though I figure that most of mine is borrowed anyway.

What? No. No pictures. Go away.

Saturday would have been Anne Frank's 75th birthday.

And what better birthday present can you give yourself than your very own LiveJournal?

(Via Better Living Through Blogging; Dave, we're both gonna burn in hell for just mentioning this thing.)

If ever I had any doubts that politicians pay attention to the Net, even down here at the D-list blog level, those doubts have been erased.

Last Friday I posted a list of candidates for House District 87, in which I live. Three Democrats and four Republicans are seeking to replace Robert Worthen, the GOP incumbent who is being term-limited out of a job. And of those seven, at least three have already taken note of that list; there are comments from them or their campaign staffs posted to it. I expect a couple of the others will follow shortly.

Ah, Google. How much you've changed this world of ours.

And a day without learning is like a day without sunshine, or something.

• Increasingly, wireless phones and phone-like devices are being used over the Internet; now they can be infected with computer viruses.

• Dawn Eden, at least lately, is not a screamer.

• One man's obscenity is another man's postal address.

• A prayer is not sufficiently non-denominational if it mentions that Jesus fellow.

• Invitations to Google's Gmail service have been bouncing at Microsoft's Hotmail service.

• If you're going to protest something, you should probably wear something.

• California, disturbed that it's not allowed to regulate fuel economy, proposes to regulate greenhouse gases instead.
  

"And so it goes." — Nick Lowe

This week's edition of the Carnival of the Vanities is brought to you by Jessica's Well, the leading blog in the Midland-Odessa-Monahans Metroplex, and by now you should already be clicking on the link to see what's there.

No way would I allow this mutant '59 Cadillac / 23rd-century sewage-treatment plant / Gatling gone wild on my shelf.

I mean, I'd feel compelled to don body armor whenever I was in the same room with it.

A commenter to this post asked me, more or less point-blank, why I wasn't dating Dawn Eden.

The obvious answer: she's 1498 miles away, give or take a wrong turn. "Hey, you wanna take in So-and-So at the Such-and-Such?" simply isn't feasible.

But there are deeper fissures between us than mere distance, and this one may be the deepest of all:

Fain would I relieve fair maiden of her burden, but for the following:

(1) I actually have a copy of The World's Worst Records Vol. 2.

(2) What's more, the same horrid little tune shows up on The Force, one of the infamous Warner/Reprise Loss Leaders, which I also have.

A genuinely crummy and marginally offensive record, and I have two copies of it. Any chance of winning her heart has obviously gone straight into the toilet.

American Equine Nutrients is located just off I-35, about a mile from Remington Park. Their product line, perhaps unfortunately in this Internet age, bears the brand name 404.

Despite this, be assured that their Web site is up and reachable.

It's called Intrinsa, a name I expect to see inflicted upon a handful of poor, defenseless baby girls a couple of years from now, and it's a testosterone patch for women that, says manufacturer Procter & Gamble, improves sexual desire and satisfaction in women whose ovaries had been removed.

Geez. I don't have ovaries, for obvious reasons, and my libido is basically shot to hell. Hmmm.... True Blue Deb says that she's not familiar with the technical term "female sexual dysfunction," but:

I suppose I could quit taking Paxil, but that would require me to start taking Paxil.

Inasmuch as I don't have a partner to disappoint, though, this is probably less of an issue than it could be.

The real source of male slovenliness, says Andrew Sullivan, is women:

Unfortunately, it's not a diamond: it's a kidney stone.

Of course, I wouldn't have this problem if I didn't persist in falling for women who are so far out of my league it seems impossible we could be playing the same game.

(Update, 6:35 am, 18 June: Dawn Eden rakes Sullivan over the coals.)

Bruce's most recent intro paragraph contains the following valuable information:

I don't think even Fargo is that somnolent.

Given the possibilities, though, perhaps he should follow this with a disclaimer: Don't try this at home.

(And I don't have a whole lot of jewelry, now that I think about it.)

Bill at Hawken Blog points out that third parties have had more influence than you think:

The Republicans, you'll remember, started out as #3 behind the Democrats and the Whigs, and pushed two issues: slavery, which they didn't want, and women's suffrage, which they did. Eventually, the Republican concentration on the former at the expense of the latter, even after the Civil War Between The States For Southern Independence, convinced the suffragists to go out on their own.

Whether the Greens or the Libertarians or some other third party (actually, anyone beyond the Greens or the Libertarians probably should be considered a fourth party) will eventually become strong enough to become a major party remains to be seen, but I'm persuaded that having them nipping at the heels of the big boys is a Good Thing, and that this state's ongoing effort to keep them off the ballot whenever possible is counterproductive at best.

South Carolina is lifting its ban on tattoo shops, which leaves one state where the practice remains illegal.

And why is that? Mike snickers:

But of course. And let's face it, we're never going to run out of either dermatologists or Southern Baptists — not that there's a whole lot of either in Iran, which ranks as just about the only other place on earth that bans tattooing.

(Disclosure: I have no such decorations. I believe I am the only family member who lacks them, in fact. I attribute this less to aesthetic concerns than to a general dislike for needles.)

Years ago, I subscribed to Townshend's Theory of Generational Purity, which goes like this: I hope I die before I get old.

One of the more rational responses to this came from critic and Who historian Dave Marsh, who said, "Well, when you find out what that means, you'll hope something else."

Over the years, I've guesstimated the upper limit of my lifespan at twenty-two, twenty-five, forty, forty-six, and somewhere between fifty-nine and eighty-seven. I need hardly point out that the first four of those predictions proved to be false.

But how long do I really have, and perhaps more to the point, how long should I have? This is the kind of unanswerable question which Joe Gandelman tries to answer in this much-linked piece about human longevity and reasons to prolong it.

Part of the problem, says Gandelman, is that society has already defined "old" and is unwilling to bump up the numbers to match the stretching of the human lifespan:

My replacements are already in place, and so are their replacements. I don't see any evidence that hastening my departure will expedite things for the grandchildren; Dear Old Dad certainly doesn't see himself, at seventy-seven, as an obstacle to his progeny, and there's no reason he should.

On the other hand, assuming I make it to sixty-nine (which I think will be the "official" retirement age by the time I get there), I would very much like to quit work, but I doubt I'll have the resources to do so, even with the remains of Social Security and the proceeds from my 401(k). I might feel differently were I doing something that actually helps to advance the human condition, but in my position as Cog in Dubious Wheel, I am way short of the motivation it takes to keep on doing it.

And rolling over the big 5 on the chronometer has had one distinct advantage: it has enabled me to think, and occasionally to say, "I'm fifty, and I shouldn't have to put up with this crap." This is the kind of elderly cantankerousness I can embrace wholeheartedly; why, sixty might actually be fun.

Pete Townshend, I note, is fifty-nine.

Seventeen months ago, I posted this:

For the very first time today, the average is now two comments per post.

Which doesn't sound like much, but considering that there are nearly 2,800 posts in this 34-month-old database, that's a hell of a lot of comments. (About 150 comments that were deemed spam have been deleted, along with a handful of duplicates; these are not included in the total.)

For those keeping score, it was Myria who actually struck the magic number. I thank her, as I thank you all. I suspect that seventeen months from now, I might be up to three comments per post.

"If you don't do something insane once in a while," I have always maintained, "you'll go crazy."

With this in mind, the following scenario may be coming soon to a chat room near you, or at least near me:

Rude Interloper: yea i bet ur just like all the others

Me [interrupting]: You're in no position to make any judgment calls about either of these women.

R.I.: is that so and how do u know did u go out with 1?

Me: With both of them, in fact.

R.I.: [speechless]

Me: Simultaneously, yet.

R.I.: no way there only half ur age

Me: Not yet, they're not.

(Note: This is not an actual chat transcript. If this had been an actual chat transcript, you would have long since abandoned this site and gone to read Fark or something.)

Sometimes it's the items I glance at and don't seem to notice that come back to bother me later.

This paragraph from Triticale is a case in point:

It was about a minute past the time I'd read this when I thought: "Wait a minute. I've heard of this guy." So I ran back through browser history — this is, incidentally, the one meaningful argument against "open links in new window" — and refreshed my memory. As in Milwaukee, Catholics in Charleston played a substantial role in the civil-rights movement of the Sixties, and as a student at a Catholic high school, I got a view of the scene that was no worse than second-hand. And while the diocese of Charleston didn't produce any figures as iconic as Fr. Groppi, we had no shortage of clergy doing the grunt work to help bring Dr. King's dream to life.

While Fr. Groppi is remembered only in some circles, pretty much everyone has heard of Dr. King. In fact, as noted by Andrew at Pathetic Earthlings, his name is everywhere, which inevitably dilutes his memory in ways not anticipated by those who wished to honor him:

I don't think it's quite as bad as Andrew suggests: I pass through Oklahoma City's Martin Luther King Avenue five or six times a week, and it does give me a brief reminder of the man and his mission, though there's always the question of why this particular stretch of road was renamed for Dr. King, as opposed to, say, Northeast 23rd Street east of Kelley, which is the primary business thoroughfare through the city's largely-black east side. (Short answer: MLK is relatively well-kept, while 23rd is a mess.)

The most telling thing about MLK, though, indeed about the MLK in your town as well, is that it's always, in full, Martin Luther King Street / Avenue / Boulevard / Road. And quite unwittingly, Dr. King seems to have started another trend: streets renamed for dignitaries are now always given the full John Jacob Jingleheimer Schmidt treatment. Downtown Oklahoma City boasts streets named for E. K. Gaylord, Robert S. Kerr and Dean A. McGee; just east in Bricktown is Mickey Mantle Drive (which, nicely enough, runs past the ballpark). All of these people, even Mantle, contributed substantially to the modest greatness that is OKC, but with their full names in white on green on every street corner, it seems to me that their contributions might appear to outshine those of, say, Paul Braniff, Anton Classen, Charles Colcord, William Couch, Robert A. Hefner, G. A. Nichols, or John Shartel, all of whom played major roles in the city's first century and all of whom are remembered on street signs — without their first names.

And I expect I'll continue to argue this point when Oklahoma City, as it must, inevitably renames a street for Cesar Chavez. (There's already a Cesar Chavez Alternative [Middle] School, on Southwest 10th east of Walker; Walker, incidentally, is named for Dr. Delos Walker, who was the first president of the Oklahoma City school board.)

My office, like many at 42nd and Treadmill, sits on a concrete floor. This presents no particular problem in itself, except that the actual building is parked in the middle of a flood plain, and before substantial corrective measures were taken, you could count on a quarter-inch of water on the floor for every inch of rain that falls.

Since I tend the server farm, and since water and computer equipment don't mix very well, a floor was built a few inches above the floor, and the high-dollar equipment was parked thereupon. This took care of the flooding problem once and for all, but introduced another: there is no such thing as a crawl space that's too small for wee forest creatures.

Sometime during the middle of last week, a creature meeting the general description of "wee" found access to said crawl space and was unable to find its way out, and its presence became known rather quickly. The upside: no one else was affected, because this room has its own separate ventilation system. The downside: the stench was concentrated rather quickly, because this room has its own separate ventilation system.

Unfortunately, for budgetary reasons, this is not one of those modular floors which can be pulled up a square foot or so at a time; disassembly (and moving all the hardware) will take just about as much time as waiting for the beastie to disintegrate sufficiently. If ever I could use a three- or four-day weekend, it's now.

The Rabid Librarian (14 June, 11:27) lists four dozen bizarre but apparently genuine medical texts which are catalogued in the National Library of Medicine's PubMed database. Some of these just demand your attention:

• Patterson R, Stewart-Patterson C.:  The well-made bed: an unappreciated public health risk.

• Horseman RE.:  Medical treatment that sucks.

• Go K.:  Constipation among operating room nurses: flatulence as evidence.

• Osmun WE, Naugler C.:  The impact of hissy fits in primary care.

• Wilhite M.:  Chronically dead persons.

• Muntz HR.:  The use of silly putty as an ear plug.
  

Collect the whole set.

(Update, 20 June, 8:15 pm: Sya has links to some of the actual documents.)

Some of the things I saw around town today:

Bill Graves, one of the looser doorknobs in the Oklahoma House, is being term-limited out of a job, and Mrs Graves isn't going to be handed the District 84 seat on the proverbial silver platter: one Democrat and a fistful of Republicans are chasing this position. One of the GOP chasers is evident Greg Kihn fan Sally Kern, whose campaign signs bear the nonce word "KERNservative."

Also on the campaign trail is District 2 Commissioner Jack Cornett, no relation to OKC Mayor Mick Cornett or to your blogging Cornetts, whose reelection signs this year contain an actual line-drawing of a cornet. Let us hope this mnemonic notion does not occur to, say, Senate District 25 candidate Dennis Loudermilk.

At a stand inside the supermarket, a woman was handing out cans of C2, the new Coke that they hope won't be another New Coke. After twelve ounces of the stuff, I am prepared to say that it's okay as a diet Coke, but no match for the Real Thing™.

(Update, 4:30 pm, 20 June: Chris Lawrence, whom I trust implicitly in such matters, says that C2 probably makes a better mixer with vodka.)

Abigail, late last night:

What we call civilization is the process of dealing with that dark and evil core and preventing it from running amok. It's a process because it's ongoing: it never ends. There is no point at which we can declare "Okay, we're civilized enough," and discontinue the process.

And contrary to the delusions of our believers in multiculturalism, those of us whose early development was informed by the writings and the histories of those often-derided Dead White European Males are generally doing a better job of keeping that core under control. I suggest that this is because the DWEMs were raised in a culture which actually acknowledged its existence (cf. Genesis 3) and proposed some semblance of a solution.

The DWEMs believed in the most basic form of egalitarianism: we are all fallen, we are all unworthy. Contemporary society has inverted this notion for the sake of our collective self-esteem, even as it berates us for using more of the world's resources per capita than your average tribesman in Borneo, who through no fault of his own might have to save up for a couple of years to make a trip to Starbucks.

Then there are the beheaders, who subscribe to a simple binary notion: you are one of us, or you are an infidel who shall be slain. It is appalling, but not at all surprising, that the multiculturalists are willing to give them a pass: we hate DWEMs, they hate DWEMs. The fact that most of the world's woes of the past thirty years were engineered by the beheaders and their friends impresses these people not a whit. "If they hate us," comes the mewl, "there must be a good reason for it." And of course there is: we are infidels, therefore we shall be slain, and since it's their culture, we are obliged to honor its provisions, and anyway, it's our fault for being over there in the first place when we should have been here, riding the bus downtown to our mandatory diversity-training sessions.

As belief systems go, present-day Islam is a strong contender for the dubious title of "Worst. Philosophy. Ever." (One can only hope that the Scientologists never obtain weapons of mass destruction.) The American left calls for withdrawal from the entire Middle East, so that lives may be saved.

Because, of course, nothing can ever happen to us over here.

For years, they sat by side by side, the Dome and the Tower, on the southeast corner of 23rd and Classen. The Dome, designed by Robert Roloff on a theme articulated by R. Buckminster Fuller, was completed in 1958, and was threatened with demolition a couple of years ago. Now owned by a local optometrist, the Dome is being refurbished, though its characteristic gold tint, weathered with age, will not be restored due to difficulty and expense.

But what of the Tower next door? Built in 1966, Roloff once again at the helm, it's a pretty fair knockoff of Frank Lloyd Wright's Price Tower in Bartlesville; it's in decent shape but is mostly empty, and a local developer picked it up this spring at a fire-sale price, suggesting that part or all of it may go condo.

This fits in with my ongoing notion that people will live downtown or close to it if you give them something distinctive, something secure, and something convenient. There aren't many high-rise residences in this area anyway, so "distinctive" is a given. The major disadvantage for downtown living has been the lack of grocers: the nearest supermarket to downtown is the Homeland adjacent to Mesta Park, at 18th and Classen. But it's only three blocks from the Tower, and three blocks farther north is Kamp's, eliminating this particular problem.

Security is another matter. This isn't a high-crime area, exactly, but it's a high-traffic area, which introduces issues of its own. And given the Tower's positioning on the edge of the Asian district, there's the question of whether its appeal will be limited to young Asian professionals, though there are easily enough such to fill up the Tower's twenty stories. (Each floor, reports the leasing agent, could accommodate three residences, roughly 1500 to 1900 square feet.)

I'm not looking to move there myself; I'm rather attached to my little patch of ground. But I tend to look favorably on plans to improve the general state of city dwellings, on the not-exactly-altruistic basis that if the quality of life in the central city as a whole goes up, so does mine; after all, I live around here too.

The Democrats' American Jobs Plan wants to stop outsourcing — by repealing tax breaks that encourage it, they say — and plans to put two million people to work by "modernizing and rebuilding our infrastructure."

Ravenwood, noting that most outsourced positions are in IT, finds the notion of putting computer types to work building roads and such amusing:

We had some (not much) sunshine today, in fact.

I rather suspect, though, that the road contracts issued by this New WPA would specifically forbid whistling at women who walk by.

And anyway, the nerdiest of the nerds could just as easily be put to work dragging broadband into rural America, so that everyone in the nation can follow not-safe-for-work links from Fark.

The National Weather Service's Forecast Discussion, which circulates behind the scenes, is available to the general public via the Web but is not promoted as a major forecast product. Which is a shame, really, since sometimes the Discussion tells you more than the actual forecast.

Here's what they sent down the line at 3:00 today:

That's "North America"; if there's a strong/persistent ridge near Noam Chomsky, I don't want to know about it.

The bottom line:

After one of the driest Mays on record, I suppose it's a good thing we're getting a June drenching. And better to soak now than two weeks from now when I hit the road — not that whatever pattern exists here is necessarily going to hold through Kansas and Nebraska.

You gotta love this. From Dawn Eden:

The numbers being what they are — J. Random Guy being a 96-percent flop — it becomes a better-than-even bet that one of these fellows might do the trick once you get seventeen in the room. (0.96 to the 17th power comes in at 0.4996; in other words, the chance of a match is 1 minus 0.4996, which is 0.5004.) It never becomes quite a certainty, as Zeno might have pointed out, and there are always imponderables to figure into the mix, but by and large, it shouldn't take a pool of candidates large enough to fill the Albert Hall to come up with Just The One.

Still, it's probably a good idea not to get too enthusiastic about the odds. As Dawn says: