It may not be true that everything old is new again, but I was never comfortable with the idea that everything old was destined for the trash heap.

So I was heartened to see that Susanna Cornett's appreciation of all things Victorian reaches even further than she might have imagined.

Well, maybe next year.

The Oklahoma City Lightning ran into some serious Detroit Demolition in last night's NWFA title game; the maidens from the Motor City put the hurt on the stormin' Sooners, 52-0. The Demolition have now won 31 in a row; I'm wondering if maybe they could actually handle one of the scuzzier NFL teams.

Blue Bell Creameries in Brenham, Texas, maker of one of the more highly-prized brands of ice cream in these parts, has come up with an oddball flavor called Heart of America, which is something like this:

Strange concept, but it works — though frankly, I think the chocolate bits detract from the red, white and blue theme.

"Take a stand," said Dave, and so I did.

(This is twice I've ripped off a topic of Dave's in a single week. Hmmm....)

In the Seventies, I found myself with entirely too much free time and a four-track tape recorder. Enlisting the aid of family members to figure out what sort of trouble we could get into with this combination, we hit upon the absurd notion of copying phonograph records to tape, replaying the tape at a slower speed and overdubbing our voices, then playing the tape at its proper speed and listening to the weird rodent noises we produced.

Which, of course, is how the late Ross Bagdasarian created the Chipmunks way back in 1958. Issued on Liberty 55168, "The Chipmunk Song (Christmas Don't Be Late)" sold about four million copies, and was reissued yearly, continuing to chart as late as 1962.

Smartasses like me, of course, continued to screw around with the concept, and it was inevitable that it would be at some point deconstructed: Sean's Said the Gramophone blog is offering a 4:43 slowed version of TCS — the single was timed at 2:17 — which lets you hear each voice Bagdasarian used at more or less its original pitch, "sounding," says Sean, "like an accountant, a hot-dog vendor, and a lunatic." Which describes Simon, Theodore and Alvin rather neatly, come to think of it.

(Via Phil Dennison, who says, "IT IS A MILLION TIMES BETTER THAN ANYTHING ON THE RADIO." What does that say about radio?)

Cast your threats upon the water, and they shall come back and soak your shoes.

Doug Clifton, editor of The Plain Dealer in Cleveland, thought it would be a really neat idea to publish the names and addresses of everyone in northern Ohio who had been issued a concealed-carry permit. His explanation:

Persuaded as I am that information about gun owners should not be compiled into any sort of database at all — what's to stop a crook from stealing their weapons one at a time, or a politician from stealing them en masse? — putting these records into play is simply reprehensible.

The advocacy group Ohioans for Concealed Carry responded by publishing Clifton's name and address and other details which could be easily found online. Clifton, of course, was not happy with this development:

Said OFCC:

I'd say they got their answer.

And further, says OFCC, noting that four other Ohio papers had printed similar lists:

I have a feeling this story is a long way from being over.

(Via Ravenwood's Universe)

You know, those boring old monogamists may have been onto something.

Really. "Money, Sex and Happiness: An Empirical Study" [it will cost you $5 to read the whole thing] is a National Bureau of Economic Research study by David G. Blanchflower (Dartmouth) and Andrew J. Oswald (Warwick). The idea: to link the common happiness survey to information on sexual behavior.

The following executive summary, sort of, appears in The Atlantic (September, "Primary Sources"):

Did I mention I quit school after ten years? :)

To expand on that "almost exactly one" business, from the actual paper:

[Preceding paragraphs © 2004 by David G. Blanchflower and Andrew J. Oswald.]

"GSS" refers to the General Social Survey of the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago.

I learned two things from this report:

(1) My instincts aren't entirely unsound, after all;

(2) Seventeen cents a page for downloaded material apparently doesn't faze me.

Ms. Christine has found out, mercifully not the hard way, that if you lose your ticket on Southwest Airlines, you have to buy a new one, and wonders why:

Of course, it may be the case, not that the programmers are total morons, but that they're working to the specifications demanded by total morons. This is a situation that exists far beyond the airline industry.

Call it a Federally-mandated surcharge under Section ID-10T, and stamp the replacement ticket accordingly.

The city of Kingfisher, thirty miles from northwest Oklahoma City, has been in a financial bind; its accumulated deficit had grown to nearly $1 million, a lot of debt for a city of four thousand people. "We would have found ourselves bankrupt in 18 months," says City Manager Doug Enevoldsen.

They're not out of the woods yet, but fiscal year 2004 ended with a surplus of $193,000 following Enevoldsen's austerity program.

Perhaps ironically, Enevoldsen himself owes his position to budget cuts: he was let go from the Department of Tourism last year as part of the state's austerity program.

I mention this because, well, I have this weird idea that governmental units should not spend more than they can reasonably expect to receive.

During World War I, the Service Flag, known more descriptively as the Blue Star Flag, was seen throughout the land, a simple banner with a blue star representing a family member serving overseas, the blue star replaced by a gold star should he be killed in battle. The practice continues to this day; if you haven't seen one lately, well, this Newsday scribe seems to think we've lost interest in such things:

Somehow this doesn't seem plausible. A lot of things have happened since, say, the founding of the Gold Star Moms, and decreasing family size is certainly one of them, but I'd argue that diminishing support for the war is at least partly due to the ongoing efforts by papers such as Newsday to make sure we get a steady dose of bad news from Iraq. Some bad news, of course, is inevitable, and not even the most avid hawks will give this operation a grade of A-plus — myself, I'm inclined to award a "gentleman's C" or thereabouts. And if we are indeed in a "post-heroic" culture these days, I suggest it has something to do with the post-World War II fascination with antiheroes, once literary curiosities, now durable archetypes.

Geitner Simmons inquires:

That, I couldn't tell you. On the other hand, Pinkerton was using this example as an illustration of how our future will be inextricably intertwined with robotics, of all things, so I'm going to assume at least standard fanboy levels of hyperbole.

Not to be confused with 98.6, but still, it's good to have it back again, "it" being the Carnival of the Vanities, presented this week by Seldom Sober in cooperation with the Office of National Blog Control Policy. ("This is your brain on blogs. Any questions?")

As always, it's worth reading, even if there's something of mine in the mix.

I mean, really: Top Ten Things You May Not Know About Dawn Eden, by Dawn Eden's mom.

The next fifty or sixty are probably just as fascinating, but I can wait. And anyway, it's not like nothing unusual has ever shown up on The Dawn Patrol; my actual phone number turned up there once, though this was my fault and it's not like Dawn ever calls anyway.

John Kerry, says New York Daily News columnist Zev Chafetz, is "the captive of the overbearing, elitist wing of his party," and as such, is sure to lose:

But surely he can dispatch the fumbling, inarticulate George W. Bush in the debates. Or can he?

Actually, Democratic true believers still think Al Gore won.

(Via La Shawn Barber)

D. Frank Robinson, who's running as a Libertarian for the 5th Congressional District seat currently held by Ernest Istook, was last mentioned here in connection with his plan for greatly expanding the size of the House of Representatives. He posted a comment to that item, which I reprint here:

This is, of course, because Oklahoma, alone among the fifty, expects a party to get signatures from five percent of the state's registered voters, more than 36,000 signatures in all, to be granted access to the statewide ballot, effectively locking the two major parties into permanent primacy. By contrast, Texas, six times bigger, demands only 45,540. (This enormous number of signatures extends to initiative petitions as well; to get a State Question that amends the Constitution on the ballot requires 15 percent of the number of votes cast in the most recent gubernatorial election [link requires Adobe Reader], which for November 2004 would be over 155,000 signatures.)

I've complained about this sort of thing before, and I suppose at some point I'll be complaining about it again. We should be encouraging political organizations, not trying to strangle them in their cribs.

Inasmuch as it's been hours since I linked to anything of Michelle Malkin's, I commend to you her Media Diversity Test, something she wrote to tweak the Unity Journalists of Color, in convention in the District of Columbia this week.

Out of a possible 100 points, Malkin of course scores an even 100. How would you fare? Give yourself five points for every Yes answer.

Assuming that in #19 she really means "God Bless the USA", I check in with a 55.

The folks at Columbus Bank and Trust Company (Member FDIC) won't say so on their Web site, but they are apparently the vendors of the Aspire Visa card, an offer for which crossed my threshold yesterday, and which provided undue levels of mirth.

Unlike some other cards I've seen, this one doesn't demand a fistful of fees before activation. On the other hand, Aspire isn't about to lose any money on this deal: the preferred interest rate is a whopping 29.75 percent, increasing to 35.75 in the case of delinquency. For someone who doesn't qualify for the preferred rate, it's 35 percent, increasing to 41 percent for deadbeats. And incidentally, these are variable rates: should the prime rate rise, which Mr Greenspan says it will, these rates rise right along with it. I suspect the Mob has more generous terms than this.

Having successfully (for now) fended off a card issuer's attempt to get 16 percent out of me on a card they gave me at 8, I can assure you, I'm not even thinking about applying for this little darb, even with its lofty (ha) $3250 credit limit.

Laura at Oddly Normal describes the process by which she came off the fence:

Conventional wisdom holds that there are relatively few voters still undecided, that most of the electorate has already thrown in with Mr Kerry or with Mr Bush. For Laura, Bush's ongoing opposition to same-sex marriage pushed her into the Kerry camp. If she's at all typical, and I have no reason to think she isn't, it will be a single issue, though not necessarily this issue, that eventually pushes the remaining fence-sitters to one side or the other.

The candidates, of course, will do their best to complicate this process by harping on their plans for the future. It would be well to remember that their actions in the past tend to be a more specific indicator of their actual positions, and a more reliable predictor of the actions they would take once inaugurated. In our Bizarro World political environment, though, the candidates don't really run on their records; they run against the other guy's. The plight of the undecided voter in the so-called "battleground" states — I'm officially still wavering, but I don't think it matters, since the President will almost certainly carry Oklahoma — will be more difficult than usual this year, I think.

(Update, 9:15 am: Ralph Nader is on the Diane Rehm Show, saying, among other things, that it's necessary to look at what a candidate has done, not at what he has promised. Hmmm.)

When a critic says a work is "derivative," what does he mean? If he's talking about a musical work, Lynn's on to him:

Oh, my. An actual tune. Nothing innovative here. Let's give it a brief, superior sneer and move on to this piece for percussion ensemble and tuba, written by an expatriate Lithuanian lesbian in response to the cruel treatment she received on a visit to Baltic Avenue in Atlantic City.

Dissonant? Atonal? Cacophonous? You betcha. But it's not derivative, and that's all that counts.

(So much for my future as a music reviewer. And Lynn's better at it anyway.)

On 31 July, a Barbados sheep was euthanized at the Fossil Rim Wildlife Center near Glen Rose, Texas; it had tested positive for rabies.

Which means that the children who visited Fossil Rim's petting zoo during late July were exposed to the disease. Sheep don't bite very often, but licking the face or an open wound is quite enough to pass on the infection.

The Children's Animal Center at Fossil Rim will be closed for 90 days; you can read the official announcement here [requires Adobe Reader].

It's no secret that many Oklahoma bridges are in wretched condition. And there's one particular bridge that, as far back as I can remember, has always been in wretched condition: the Walnut Avenue overpass, which connects the Deep Deuce and Bricktown areas. (Walnut, south of Main, becomes Mickey Mantle Drive.)

Three years ago, a move to tear down the bridge entirely was foiled when then-Mayor Kirk Humphreys discovered that under state law, the Union Pacific railroad, whose tracks run under the bridge, could be billed up to half the cost of repairs.

The city has the money to fix the bridge — the Walnut Avenue project was funded in a 1989 bond issue — but the railroad has yet to consent to the repairs. In the meantime, Paul Brum, the city engineer, says that beams under the bridge are deteriorating, and therefore the bridge is closed until further notice; repairs should take about a year.

I tell you what, if Alan Keyes can get settled into his new home in Illinois between now and the first Tuesday in November, I'd say it's prima facie evidence that he has both enough presence of mind and physical stamina to be a United States Senator.

I do think, though, that he might be well advised to consult with the junior senator from New York, whose experience in executing a similar maneuver could prove useful.

Evolving Beauty [title page possibly not safe for work, subsequent pages almost certainly NSFW] is a collection of photographs by Eric Boutilier-Brown.

Susanna Cornett is impressed by some of the photos, not impressed by others, and by her own admission somewhat conflicted:

I think part of the problem is the coupling of "sex and nudity" as a single concept, as many people (though not Susanna, I suspect) do; while nudity certainly facilitates sex, it doesn't imply it, unless you've somehow acquired the notion that apart from bathroom functions, the only reason to take off your clothes is to have sex. Any semi-serious skinnydipper knows better than that.

Still, discerning intention occasionally requires some work. Flashing a barista is very likely an act of exhibitionism, something not to be encouraged officially. (My apologies in advance to baristas.) Camping nude in a national park (which is not generally illegal under Federal law) probably isn't, but it could be. Dressing up with the hope that one's garb will lead to what Helen Gurley Brown once called "getting Dial spelled backwards" likely is.

I'm not going to suggest that everyone shuck his duds for the sheer delight of it. (Of course, if you do, I'm not going to complain, unless you do it in my driveway.) But it might not be a bad idea to create a little Garden of Eden of your own, outdoors if you dare, indoors if you don't — provided, of course, you keep in mind what happened in the first one.

(Disclosure: Written while dressed.)

No changes in drug consumption, mind you: just a wider spectrum of really bizarre ideas that obviously reside somewhere in the back of my head.

The roof is leaking in the converted Sherwin-Williams store (or whatever the heck it is) where I live, and nobody answers the phone, so I drive up 4th Avenue in search of assistance, only to be stopped by flood waters which aren't exactly raging but which aren't going to allow passage either. The ferryman says I'll have to leave my car behind, but he has a chair left, into which I scramble. It's more of a bar stool with a back, actually; nice cherrywood finish. Amazing how it holds up under these conditions.

After which I am unceremoniously dropped into some dismal landscape in which the name of Lileks is occasionally spoken, usually in hushed tones, maybe reverent, maybe fearful. I get it, I thought. This is one of his dreams. Let's hope not. I have to admire some of the construction work — a machine that can fabricate funnel cakes and nunchucks simultaneously deserves some sort of accolade — and I had to grin at the idea of Alice B. Toklas having a recipe for summer sausage, but this clearly wasn't the place for me. Lileks himself appeared briefly in a doorway, looking rather like Dave Barry, had Marcellus from Pulp Fiction gotten medieval on Dave Barry's ass.

Cut to the sneak preview of a new non-Star Wars film by George Lucas, and while I forget the title, I figured the best I could hope for was something other than Willow II. Maybe THX 2100. No such luck. It came off more or less like Henry V in Space, and the much-hyped "surprise plot twist" wouldn't have surprised anyone old enough to have gotten through potty training. The credits, though, were full of in-jokes, and cards in the seatback pockets obligingly detailed every last one of them. I stayed long enough for the lights to come back up, whereupon the theater operator cut to a local radio station doing a pitch for some car show, and as I left, I heard my brother doing a creditable Darryl Starbirdesque "BE THERE!"

Downstairs, I sought to get the bad taste of Lucas out of my mouth with an arcade game, and the only one open was a truly bizarre thing with an ersatz Dick Tracy theme. It was your basic shoot-'em-up, yes, but sometimes when you shot 'em, a voiceover popped in with a list of reasons why you shouldn't have. "Political correctness," I sighed, and the fellow next to me, who in fact had been doing those voiceovers, said, "Well, it's a living."

After that, waking up was actually an improvement.

A California attorney, claiming he was the subject of abuse on Yahoo! message boards, is assembling a class-action lawsuit against Yahoo! on behalf of Californians who have been similarly picked on. Apparently the cruel words came fast and furious:

McGehee is properly scornful:

And Galton will probably have a hissy fit over his new prominence in the search engines, too.

This reminds me of an incident twenty-odd years ago in which Car and Driver ran a column which castigated the legal profession for various offenses against motoring enthusiasts. An attorney wrote in to cancel his subscription in protest; the magazine printed his letter, along with the following response:

All by itself, that was worth a three-year renewal.

I was threading my way back from Sears' repair location, which is tucked away southwest of the Capitol complex, and eventually I found myself at 23rd and Classen, where Beverly's Restaurant had been bulldozed into oblivion to make way for the city's 726th Walgreens store.

Beverly's, of course, was an Oklahoma City staple for years, and their Chicken in the Rough was briefly franchised to other eateries. And while this location had been closed for some time, Beverly's Pancake Corner, west of Penn Square, still serves breakfast and lunch, so it's not the end of an era. Yet.

Besides, it could have been worse. Walgreens at first tried to get a different corner of this intersection: the one occupied by the Gold Dome.

North of 23rd, the new Asian District signage is in place, white on red in the sort of font one expects to find in ads for Chinese restaurants. A letter to The Oklahoman last week complained about the whole idea:

Which is a reasonable point, but identifying a mile of Classen Boulevard as an Asian District hardly constitutes segregation. For one thing, it's not a reflection of housing patterns; Americans of Asian descent live all over the city and in the suburbs, not just around this area. For another — well, Tom Waken, who owns property on Classen and elsewhere, and who sits on the Asian District Commission, sent this to the Mid-City Advocate:

And that initial arrival of Asian-owned businesses got this area, and the strip of 23rd just to its east, known informally as "Little Saigon," a name which has persisted all these years; it's not like anyone should be at all surprised by this.

Will we eventually see Latino (around, say, SW 29th and Western), African-American (NE 23rd and Martin Luther King), even gay (NW 39th and Pennsylvania) districts? I'm thinking we will, and I'm thinking it's just fine with me.

The transformation of the record business into the Music Industry basically spelled the end of the regional hit, the record that all the locals dearly loved and which the rest of the nation unaccountably spurned, ending up way below Billboard's Top 40 as a result but still able to bring back memories.

The archetype for this situation might be Bob Seger, who cut more than a dozen singles in the late Sixties and early Seventies that sold in the high five figures in his native Detroit and apparently nowhere else; of the lot, only "Ramblin' Gamblin' Man," credited to the Bob Seger System and issued on Capitol 2297 in 1968, made any serious chart noise, topping out at #17. It would be six years before Beautiful Loser made him a household name in more than a handful of households, and "Night Moves" was still yet to come.

The Detroit soul scene included one monolith — Motown — and one scrappy little competitor, Eddie Wingate's Golden World/Ric-Tic group, which Berry Gordy eventually bought out, ostensibly to get Edwin Starr, Wingate's biggest act, perhaps more likely to keep the Funk Brothers from moonlighting on other people's records. There were major soul scenes in Memphis and in Muscle Shoals, and minor soul scenes in dozens of other places.

One of those scenes was in Columbus, Ohio, and the man behind it is Bill Moss, who at the time was a DJ at WVKO radio and who had cut a couple of records in the late Sixties that went nowhere in particular. In 1970, Moss called for local talent to fill up a local show and maybe fill out the roster for a new record label; the first release on Capsoul (short for Capital City Soul, of course) was Marion Black's "Go On Fool" b/w "Who Knows", issued as CS-20. "Go On Fool" was an extended lament in Toussaint McCall mode, which was picked up for national distribution by Avco Embassy. But the real gem was the flip: "Who Knows" was a spirited shuffle with gospel overtones which got far more airplay. While both sides obviously sold the same, neither individually made the Hot 100.

Still, it was enough to get Bill Moss going. He built a small studio and wangled some local financing, and in 1971 issued perhaps the most remarkable disc of his career: "You Can't Blame Me", CS-22, by "Johnson, Hawkins, Tatum & Durr," a group of Columbus kids who up to this point had been called the Revelations. Hawkins didn't actually exist — this was a typo by Moss, who apparently forgot Al Dawson's real name when he typeset the labels — but the one who got the attention was Virgil Johnson, who sang in a quavering yet somehow never thin falsetto that beautifully offset the bumpy bassline and the staccato shouts from the background. Not willing to be a big fish in a small pond, Johnson eventually betook himself to Los Angeles and promptly disappeared.

By 1974, Capsoul was still holding its own, having issued a dozen singles and one LP — Gently Down Your Stream (CSLP-370) by the Four Mints, then the label's most consistent act — when the bankers decided that they'd had enough: Bill Moss, they said, was "too emotionally involved" with Capsoul. Moss' studio was padlocked; he spirited away the master tapes and stored them at a friend's house. Flood waters came, with the results you'd expect; disheartened, Moss took what little inventory he had down to a record-pressing plant in Cincinnati and had it recycled.

And that might have been the end of that, except for one minor detail: memories don't die as easily as vinyl does. Bill Moss dabbled in politics, eventually serving on the Columbus school board; he still does a radio show for WVKO. Once in a blue moon, someone would ask to license Capsoul tracks, and Moss would say thanks, but no thanks.

Then Ken Shipley, late of Rykodisc and now running his own boutique label, got a whiff of "You Can't Blame Me." He drove to Columbus to talk to Moss, and this time Moss said yes. Nineteen tracks, all painstakingly remastered from vinyl pressings, are compiled on Eccentric Soul: The Capsoul Label, the first release (literally: #001) from the Numero Group. If you grew up in Ohio or thereabouts, you may remember some of these tracks; if you didn't, now's your chance.

Hint: it's not an upgrade.

Andrea Harris isn't pleased with this product either:

For a couple of putative backwoods Arkansawyers, Bill 'n Hill seem awfully well-versed in all things Machiavellian.

Then again, John Kerry did get three Purple Hearts. Just ask him.

Red Adair, who started out as a roughneck in an Oklahoma oilfield in the Thirties and wound up the go-to guy when your oil or gas well was on fire, died this weekend in Houston at 89.

After World War II, during which he was part of a bomb-disposal unit, Paul N. Adair went to work for Myron Kinley, who had built a business controlling oilfield fires, and set up his own company in 1959. He stayed with it for thirty-five years, taking on the scariest assignments imaginable and inspiring the 1968 film Hellfighters, starring John Wayne and crediting Adair as technical advisor — though it was the Wayne character's assistant, played by Jim Hutton, who proved to be the real hothead on screen.

In 1991, Adair, then seventy-six, was brought in by the Kuwaiti government to tame the dozens of oil wells set ablaze during the Gulf War, a project predicted to last three to five years, which Adair's team finished in less than nine months.

Red Adair feared no fire, on earth or elsewhere; he quipped in 1991 that he'd struck a deal with the devil "to give me an air-conditioned place when I go down there, if I go there, so I won't put all the fires out." Myself, I rather think he's gone somewhere with better climate.

Nissan has been schlepping this teensy car around the show circuit, and it's in production for the Japanese domestic market. The Moco hews closely to the Japanese minicar spec — 3.4 meters in length, 660-cc engine — and will be available with optional all-wheel drive. Oh, and Nissan's not actually making it at all; it's a rebadged Suzuki MRwagon. Despite its confused parentage, it's selling well in Japan.

There's probably no market for the Moco in the US, mostly because Americans don't have much interest in cars a foot shorter than a Mini Cooper fercryingoutloud, but at least partially, I suspect, because the growing Latino submarket isn't likely to be delighted by a car whose name means "snot" in Spanish.

Later this week I will trudge across town for my first meeting with an orthopedic surgeon, who will review the results of my recent MRI (not good) and will make recommendations for treatment (not cheap).

Interestingly, I have been in somewhat less pain in recent months, which I attribute to an increase in sunshine, an increase in the diversity of my movements — going to work and working in the yard affect the knees differently — and, for all I know, divine intervention. (Not that it would occur to me to cry O Lord, take this burden from me; I always assumed He had more important things to do.)

By the end of the week, I'll know more.

While I get an occasional attaboy for this site design, I feel compelled to point out that it's simple and uncluttered because that's about the extent of my design abilities; there is no shortage of people who can produce really excellent yet still highly-readable pages, but I'm not one of them.

On the other hand, try as I may, I can't seem to muck it up as badly as Microsoft. Here's Phil Ringnalda on the new MSN blogs:

Having seen some of the hash that emerges from FrontPage, I'm afraid even to look at this stuff.

And, of course, there's this:

What, precisely, is IE better than? Lynx?

I'm still on a relatively old (2.64) version of Movable Type. I think I'll stay put.

(Via Dowingba)

Terry Nichols drew 161 consecutive life terms without parole today for his role in the 1995 bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City.

The sentence was issued by US District Judge Steven Taylor after the jury failed to agree on a sentence. In addition to the life terms for the murder charges, Nichols received shorter terms on arson and conspiracy charges, was fined $30,000, and was ordered to pay $5 million in restitution and legal fees, plus $161,000 toward the victims'-compensation fund.

Once the proceedings in Oklahoma are wrapped up, Nichols will return to federal custody in Colorado, where he is already serving eight life terms.

MAPS for Kids is the successor to the original Metropolitan Area Projects plan that renovated so much of downtown Oklahoma City. The plan, funded by a temporary sales tax (seven years), will take ten years to implement completely. Half a billion dollars will be pumped into Oklahoma City Public Schools, and $150 million more into suburban districts that overlay parts of the city. The Chamber of Commerce has begun sending out a quarterly newsletter called Transformations, to advise us taxpayers where the money is being spent. From the looks of this sidebar on page seven, apparently none of the $650 million went to proofreading.

Unexpected parcel last night, which turned out to be 32 pages of biographical material on my old high school class, issued for the 35th reunion last month (which took place about the time I was returning from the World Tour). It was gratifying, I guess, to see that some of the couples were still together after all these years. Most of the class stayed pretty close to home; the committee had obtained addresses on about four-fifths of us, and I'm 1230 miles from the school, good for third-farthest away. (We have one alum near Austin, Texas, twenty miles farther out, but the winner, by a considerable margin, is between Bakersfield and Santa Barbara, California.)

And yes, alas, a dozen or so are gone. Inevitable, I suppose, but still it tugs at me.

The biggest kick? Following up on the Web and finding an Al Hirschfeld drawing of one of us. Not that I'd ever fall back on "I knew her when."

(Update: Added link to school site.)

Steve Skubinna poses a question to Andrea Harris, and offers some answers:

Being something of a traditionalist, I think there's still a place for the jackboot; tried and true, it still packs a wallop, delivering a full measure of imagery with each and every step. Besides, if the future is indeed, as Orwell says, "a boot stomping on a face forever," you can bet it's not an Ugg boot.

That said, should Ann Coulter or Laura Ingraham prefer to crush dissent in strappy sandals, I'm probably the last person in the world to object.

Apparently five American girls, according to the Social Security Administration.

Name by name, but not by nature, one hopes.

Grameen ("Rural") Bank is an anomaly among financial institutions: 90 percent of its shares are owned by the poor people of Bangladesh whom it serves. (The government in Dhaka owns the remaining ten percent.)

Grameen's specialty is microcredit, and here's how it works:

And the story of one of these women is at the heart of the motion picture 16 Decisions, named for the philosophies underlying Grameen Bank lending. I haven't seen it yet, but Christine has — it's running on the Sundance Channel, which is outside my cable tier for now — and she was moved:

Words to live by, and not just for women either.

The mix is perfect: two or three inches of rain, which means that drainage, theoretical at best in some parts of town, has become all but nonexistent; street lights being turned off because, after all, it's sunrise; and winds howling from the north at 40 mph or thereabouts. An eleven-mile commute is no treat under the best conditions; add all this and you've got a recipe for disaster.

Not that anything befell me today. Under hazardous conditions, my tendency is to put the hammer down and keep it there, reasoning (if that's the word) that the sooner I finish the trip, the sooner I get away from the hazards. This actually seems to work far better than it deserves to.

John Kerry's secret plan's no secret anymore:

Whatever the hell that means. (And they say Bush has trouble with the language.)

The implications, however, seem clear enough. Notes Mitch Berg:

Which may be an exaggeration, but riddle me this: In the Sixties and Seventies, John Kerry (d)evolved from a marginal hawk to the shrillest possible dove. At the 2004 Democratic convention, he made all sorts of hawkish noises. What in this man's history would make anyone think he might actually have meant any of them?

(Via Steve Gigl)

The American Chesterton Society recently made its first-ever pilgrimage to G. K. Chesterton's England, and Dawn Eden was there.

For the most part, she was delighted, though she was dismayed to see a peripheral argument among the pilgrims — whether Shakespeare was a Roman Catholic, of all things — taking center stage. "Somewhere along the way," she says, "the idea of examining and celebrating G. K. Chesterton's life and career got buried." Nonsense in the wrong place? Perhaps.

I rather think she'll have more to say in the next couple of days, but for now, let's welcome her home. (I, of course, followed the other way home: I stayed there.)

(Update, 4:45 pm: Gawker welcomes Dawn home with their infamous Five Questions.)

Ninety-nine Carnivals of the Vanities on the Web.

This week's edition is presented by The Smallest Minority with the obligatory Suitable Theme; as always, it's your quick-and-easy guide to last week's best blogging.

And remember: if you LOAD [filename],8, it loads to the bottom of the BASIC program area, whereas if you LOAD [filename],8,1, it loads at the location specified in the program itself. (Of course, if you just type LOAD, it pulls the first program off the Datassette.)

I think. After a couple of decades, it's hard to be sure without access to the original hardware.

If you're going to dress like this, you should probably not be in front of Lynn at the video store:

As far as this visible-underwear business goes, while I suppose I should appreciate a peek at something I have no reason to expect to see on a regular basis, there's still Lileks' Law of Lingerie, which I've invoked before:

Some people simply ask too much of their underwear.

"It's not a question of if you'll need that knee replaced," said the doctor. "It's a question of when."

Okay, then. When?

"By the time you're sixty," he said. Nine years and odd, at best.

In the meantime, there is arthroscopy and, um, debridement. (As in debris, which will presumably be removed.) It's a simple procedure, I am assured, but all it does, really, is buy me some time.

And I'm fine with that. I don't think it will keep me from having to have the whole nine yards within the next nine years, but never underestimate my capacity for procrastination. (And if you do, take your time doing it.)

Let it be said, right up front, that not everyone in the Garden State is a fan of soon-to-be-ex-governor Jim McGreevey.

Still, I suspect he's going to come out of this scandal smelling, if not like a rose, certainly like some pricey Calvin Klein foo-foo juice: by coming out of his self-imposed closet, McGreevey, at least to some folks, is going to look like some sort of sexual martyr, sent to his political death because he had the temerity to express the love that dare not speak its name. "I am a gay American," indeed. Jeff Jarvis reports that over in Philly, the Inquirer newsroom actually cheered at that admission. Yep, he's an adulterer, and he's gone out of his way to find a wholly-inappropriate job for his presumed boyfriend, but dammit, he's a member of a Protected Minority now, and if we say anything bad about him, why, it's our homophobia showing through, nothing more.

Truth be told, I really don't think New Jersey gives a flying fish about McGreevey's sexual orientation; it's been muttered about in muffled tones for years. "It makes," as he said, "little difference." Here's what Jeff Jarvis thinks of the guy:

And the worst is apparently yet to come.

Huh? What? It isn't?

Well, would one of you be so kind as to inform young Johnny Kerry?

A lot of people have a stake in the outcome.

Getting through Tulsa is perhaps more difficult than it needs to be, and existing bypasses don't really bypass much. (Not that we can brag all that much over here in Oklahoma City.)

Hence: I-844, an idea for a 194-mile beltway around Tulsa and Tulsa County. Mile 0 is set at the presumed junction with the Turner Turnpike near Bristow.

Martin McMahon, who came up with the idea, explains:

I wonder if they'd try to turn it into a toll road, in the manner of the Kilpatrick Turnpike around the northwest quadrant of Oklahoma City.

Spoons presumably takes a dim view of "affordable housing" mandates, and quotes this Chicago Tribune report:

In general, housing is considered "affordable" if you don't have to spend more than 30 percent of your gross income for it. For someone making less than $2583 a month, $775 monthly rent is not "affordable." (The comparable figures for Oklahoma City for fiscal year 2004 are $1870 and $561.)

What does this new Illinois law require?

Which is easier said than done, says Brett Blomberg, mayor of the comparatively posh village of Lincolnshire:

The last time I got onto this subject, I came up with this marginal wisdom:

At my income level, I couldn't possibly hope to live in a place like Lincolnshire. In a society with some measure of rationality, I would be urged to do one of the following: either improve that income, or go live somewhere I can afford. The town can't legally keep me out — probably wouldn't dream of keeping me out — but there's no justification for forcing a property owner in that town to sell to me, or to rent to me, at a price far below what he wants and can get.

This is not to say, of course, that I object to people living beyond their means. I do, however, object to government policies that encourage it, and to being taxed for the benefit of those thus encouraged.

The Tax Foundation's new quarterly newsletter TaxWatch is pitched at those of us who didn't major in economics. Judging by the first issue [requires Adobe Reader], I'd say it hits its target pretty well; it's perhaps a touch too splashy, but it's solidly written.

Andrew Chamberlain has the cover story this quarter: a comparison of Bush and Kerry tax proposals. Of course, what I really want you to read is the Tax Foundation's list of criteria for good tax policy, incorporated therein.

You know the feeling. People have talked it up for the longest time, maybe you've heard a track on the radio that you liked, and so you plunk down your coin of the realm for the album, peel off the shrinkwrap, and lie back, waiting to be transformed. And forty or fifty minutes later, you look up, stare disbelievingly at either the ceiling or the stereo, and mumble: "That kinda... sucked."

Kill Your Idols: A New Generation of Rock Writers Reconsiders the Classics [Fort Lee, NJ: Barricade Books], compiled and edited by Jim DeRogatis and Carmél Carrillo, is dedicated to the proposition that you may be right. The cover blurb barely scratches the surface:

Okay, docked a point for using "hegemonic," but "spirited" doesn't come close to describing the sheer glee with which these thirty-four writers eviscerate some of your (and my) favorite albums. Your friend and mine, Dawn Eden, even takes on an unreleased "masterpiece," the Beach Boys' Smile project, whose reputation seems to rest solely upon the notion that if one wigged-out genius (Brian Wilson) is good, two wigged-out geniuses (add Van Dyke Parks) must be superlative.

Why is punk poet Patti Smith lionized? Melanie Haupt explains:

Not that, say, Jim Morrison has any badass credentials: "The Ashton Kutcher of his time."

If you've ever wondered what's so damn great about Sgt. Pepper's or Exile on Main St. or even Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, Kill Your Idols tells you in no uncertain terms: not much. If this book stops you from buying even one of these CDs from amazon.com because you need $13 more to qualify for free shipping, it's done its job.

Inspired by Jay Tea's calculations, I'm looking at my own 2000 and 2003 numbers, and the figure that jumps out at me is this: in 2003, I paid $41 less federal income tax than I did in 2000, despite an increase in taxable income of $2279.

My effective tax rate, for this particular tax anyway: 2000 — 12.38%; 2003 — 10.69%. Not perphaps as inspiring as Jay's rate, which was sliced in half, but definitely an improvement. (Like Jay, I had no change in filing status or exemptions during the period, and both of us claimed the standard deduction.)

On the question of health insurance: for me, the employer picks up the entire premium (one advantage of tenure), though copays and deductibles are rising steadily.

What Jay thinks:

I have to demur to some extent — there are many factors besides the hyperactivity of trial lawyers contributing to the rapid increase in health-care costs — but my major worry here is that a Kerry administration would think I make too much money (ha!) to deserve any kind of tax relief and would promptly start turning the screws a little tighter.

And forget that business about selfishness. There is no reason on God's green earth why anyone should feel compelled to pay more tax.

The transformation of the Samurai Club on May south of Grand into — well, I have no idea what's going to replace it — continues apace: the new architecture is Standard Suburban Medical Office, minus the bogus roof extensions over the doorways, which could mean almost anything. No signage yet; in fact, the old Samurai marquee is still in place, with only a few missing characters here and there.

Tuesday marks the opening of the Ronald J. Norick Downtown Library, the last of the MAPS projects, at 300 Park Avenue. And "300" seems to be something of an understatement: the facility stretches across the entire 300 block, from Harvey to Hudson. It's an imposing structure; the only trick is actually getting there, since Harvey terminates at Park and it's one-way north, meaning you have to take either Hudson or Robinson south, meaning quite a roundabout if you're coming from the downtown Business District where all the signs are. Still, accessibility wasn't a problem Friday for the book-passing ceremony, in which books were literally handed down, one person to the next in an enormous chain, from the old library at 131 (not 301) Dean A. McGee to the new one.

A nearby salon is pitching "pedicures for men and women," which at least seems nicely nondiscriminatory, and to tell you the truth, I was at least slightly tempted: while my instincts tend toward the retrosexual, I am also sufficiently self-indulgent to be able to come up with a justification for it. Besides, I'm somewhat curious as to whether they'd charge me extra for these size-14 clodhoppers.

Yard signs have yet to come into full bloom for the November election — in a quick run through my neighborhood, the only ones I spotted were for the two State House candidates who survived their respective primaries, a couple of Tom Coburn signs, and a single Kerry/Edwards sign — but bumper stickers are starting to appear hither and yon, and one I hadn't seen before turned up yesterday on a Dodge Magnum wagon in Arrest Me Red with a cardboard dealer plate: Buck Fush.

Which begs the question: Is it technically a bumper sticker if it's not placed on the actual bumper? This one, along with Lick Bush in 2004, which I have seen before, was placed along the lower edge of the rear window, which in a Dodge Magnum wagon is about four feet off the ground.

I wasn't especially perturbed by either of these — I mean, I live in the state where Tuck Fexas is a way of life — but I rather think I would have reacted badly to something like this.

To create bias in a news article, it's not necessary to misstate the facts; it is necessary only to establish a specific point of view as the default. Susanna Cornett calls this "framing," and she's written extensively on the subject.

This WaPo piece by Dan Balz drew the attention of Patterico:

The same facts, yet an entirely different analysis. Is this possible? As an experiment, Patterico rewrites the story, completely inverting its political predilections in the process, and the only surprise comes from how easy he makes it look. Bias lurks in even the smallest throwaway phrases; no wonder there's so much of it.

Don't count on it. (And don't call me Shirley.)

Of course, I never once envisioned that eight years of cluttering up the Web, as I have, would fill even one of the empty lines on my dance card, but on the other hand, what else is there?

Well, there's this.

(Via Washington Interns Gone Bad: The Blog)

Pointing toward my review of the highly-revisionist Kill Your Idols, Francis W. Porretto sees some difficulty with going home again:

For me, the formative year was 1961, the beginning of an unprecedented (for my family, anyway) eight-year stay in one place, the year in which I was granted access to my very own radio. This morning, I popped a compilation of 1961 tunes into the car to see if I'd gotten bored with them yet.

And from the opening riff of Del Shannon's "Runaway," I knew I hadn't; even now, forty-three years after the fact, the thrill is there. And it held up, through "Quarter to Three," through "There's a Moon Out Tonight" (a 1958 track reissued that year), all the way to the Marcels' gleeful expropriation of Rodgers and Hart's "Blue Moon."

So what's the difference between FWP and me? He's slightly older, but not enough to mark any sort of generational rift. I interpret his "thirty years ago" statement to be general, and not a specific reference to 1974, a generally crappy year for pop music other than R&B.

Maybe it's the idea of albums versus singles. I subscribe to the mostly-unpopular (but now easily verifiable in the age of downloadable music) notion that albums tend to be, in critic Dave Marsh's phrase, "singles separated by varying amounts of filler," and many, perhaps most, of the acts of this period ran out of things to say long before the end of Side Two. But FWP isn't saying whether his boredom comes from individual songs or from an elpee's worth of toons.

And to be upfront about it, I never much cared about the ages of the performers on my little plastic waffles; it is at least somewhat true, as FWP says, that "it was music made by the very young, to appeal to the very young" — R&B, at least when I was that age, was primarily oriented toward adults no matter who the buyers turned out to be — but the credibility of any particular act, to me at least, never seemed to be dependent upon its chronological age.

So is my nostalgia more advanced than FWP's? I don't think so. I still delight in hearing songs from this period I'd never heard before, songs for which there's no specific connection in memory. When questions like this arise, I tend to fall back on the wisdom of Sylvester Stewart: "Different strokes for different folks."

And so on, and so on, and scooby-dooby-doo.

The Universal Donor points out that it's not like this is the first time there's been a case of adultery in the Tri-State Area:

And you didn't see Rudy quitting his job over it, either:

[Expletive deleted for reasons of, well, um, people looking over my shoulder.]

How likely is it that McGreevey could pull that off? Not very. So:

Somehow I can't imagine the Barista or the Prop warming to this.

Well, maybe not you or me. But a study in Korea suggests a 70-percent increase in the incidence of leukemia in persons living near AM broadcast towers.

Before you swear off your favorite talk show, though, please note that the Korean study was limited to individuals living in the vicinity of 100,000-watt transmitting facilities; US AM stations max out at 50,000 watts, which would imply a lower risk, and where space is available, their towers tend to be located in areas with relatively low population. Further, the Koreans caution that their study does not establish a direct link between high-power AM waves and cancer.

FM stations here in the flyover zone are allowed 100,000 watts under certain circumstances, but FM waves, which differ substantially in shape and frequency from AM waves, were not implicated in the study.

(Via Fark)

Hanah Metchis at Reason discloses that while India gets lots of condoms from the First World, what with AIDS and humongous population growth and all, not all of them are being used in accordance with the label instructions:

It would never work in Oklahoma; we're used to our roads being ribbed for extra, um, whatever.

(Title swiped from Shannon Love)

Well, it's not, actually, but were I attending one of the local schools, I'd probably be saying something like that towards the middle of the day. In an effort to get everyone off the premises by Memorial Day, school districts had been starting classes as early as the second week of August.

Then in 2002, Tulsa Public Schools, the state's largest district, moved their start date to early September; they've since realized some $380,000 in savings simply from not having the air conditioning cranked up to August levels for two weeks.

Oklahoma City Public Schools followed suit last year, saving about $125,000, and will start classes this year on the 30th of August. (Suburban districts are on their own schedules; Norman starts on the 25th, Putnam City the 26th, Edmond the 23rd.)

Three schools in the Oklahoma City district are on a year-round schedule: Horace Mann, Sequoyah, and Westwood. They started classes 22 July; after each of the first three nine-week sessions, there's a three-week break, and after the fourth, a seven-week summer break. How this affects utility costs, I don't know; the district says the reduced downtime in the summer has brought about some academic improvement.

A bald declaration by the Los Angeles Times:

Of course, since minorities are now the majority in Los Angeles County, it might be reasonable to ask if 83 percent of suspects, bitten or unbitten, are minorities. Not that the Times would ever ask such a thing.

Patterico has even more questions, none of which seem to concern the Times.

And if words are all they have to take your heart away, they just might have their work cut out for them; many wonderful ingredients are combined to make the best rock and roll songs, but inspiring lyrics seldom will be found among them. ("Rock lyrics are doggerel, maybe." — Dave Marsh)

Those surly folks at The Hatemonger's Quarterly would like your nominations for the worst single line in, as Casey Kasem used to call it, "the rock era." I rather expect that their mailboxes will overflow rather quickly with genuine, unadulterated dreck.

(Via Reflections in d minor)

According to the flyer in this month's utility bill, the city of Oklahoma City is setting up a drop on Saturday, 11 September, at the Fairgrounds, for the following sorta-hazardous wastes:

• Used tires;
  
• Used computer equipment;
  
• Presumably unused ammunition.
  

I've got to wonder how they decided on that particular grouping. They won't take tires at the Household Hazardous Waste facility.

And I mean first; a British archaeologist, after five years of research, has concluded that a cave on the Israeli Kibbutz Tzuba was the base of operations for John the Baptist.

The cave, about two and a half miles from John's birthplace at Ein Kerem, features a pool of water which would be just perfect for, you guessed it, baptism, and art on the cave walls seems to illustrate a Nazarite, which John was.

None of this is necessarily conclusive, but real-world corroborations of Gospel events have been few and far between, and while a certain skepticism is probably healthy at this point, I have a gut feeling (if that's the term) that this might be the real deal.

Or is that a Sears poncho?

After looking at the new stuff for fall in the rag mags, I'm inclined to think that fashion that isn't somewhere between absurd and abominable, be it from the Seventies or any other decade you can name, isn't really fashion at all. People with actual style tend to stick with it, year after year.

Come to think of it, that's what I do, and I have no discernible style whatsoever.

Which is not a novel by Gabriel Gárcia Márquez, but the duration of the remarkably-persistent Carnival of the Vanities, in a special 100th Anniversary Celebración at Fringe. Bloggy goodness and beads — what more could you want?

(Note: Link seems to be sporadic; try here and scroll if you get a blank page.)

The logo of the Department of Health of the District of Columbia somehow fails to inspire confidence.

(Via Hit & Run)

I mean, really, a pro-choice thong?

Is it just me, or does it look like they ("they" being Planned Parenthood, its affiliates, and its friends) are pulling out all the stops to make abortion not only socially acceptable but downright cuddly?

Dawn Eden observes:

Actually, that was one of the milder things she said.

Some of us over the years have been uncomfortable with the whole idea of abortion but haven't been quite ready to call for an outright ban. But if its proponents are going to treat it as some sort of lifestyle choice, of no more importance than "Hmmm, flats or heels tonight?" — well, let's just say they're setting themselves up for a lesson in the Law of Unintended Consequences.

Yeah, yeah, I know: it's a routine medical procedure. So is vasectomy, and they don't have thongs for that.

Oh, wait, they do.

Jeebus. Welcome to the Age of Trivialization. Please take a logo-branded seat and wait your turn.

Judge Donald Thompson, last seen exercising the wrong judicial prerogative in his Sapulpa courtroom, will retire at the end of this month rather than face ouster charges.

Thompson's attorney had this to say:

The allegations, filed by Attorney General Drew Edmondson this summer, included a variety of acts The Oklahoman describes as "genital-related."

Thompson's trial, scheduled for 13 September, will presumably be called off.

My favorite Rocksnob, DragonAttack, identifies an intermediate value, sort of:

This is extensible at least as far back as, oh, early Herman's Hermits.

"I'm Henry the eighth, I am...."

Tulsa author S. E. Hinton, who's scarcely been heard from since Taming the Star Runner sixteen years ago, finally has a new novel coming out, and this time it's not aimed at young readers.

Hawkes Harbor, published by New York-based TOR Books, is due 15 September.

Hinton's The Outsiders, published in 1967 while she was still a student at Will Rogers High School in Tulsa, is the best-selling young-adult novel of all time.

Jeff Quinton, the Backcountry Conservative, is compiling a list of bloggers who are serving or have served in the US military, and I rather suspect there are a lot more of us out there.

If you're just tuning in, well, I'm not inclined to go scan my DD 214 just now, but I did serve in the Army from 1972 through 1975, with three years of mostly-inactive Reserve time ending in 1978. (If anyone cares, I trained as a 71B — clerk-typist — but wound up in the then-new MOS of 75C: personnel management specialist. Yes, friends, I was geeky even in fatigues.)

If you blog and you'd like to be on the list, send Jeff Quinton (who was in the S.C. Army National Guard) a Trackback to his post.

People, usually well-meaning, will tell you to your face "it's just a number," but every time the Odometer of Life rolls over another digit I feel something of a twinge. (Heaven help us all when it rolls over two digits at once.)

Still, once you've done enough of these, the presumed panic eventually gives way to — a sort of contentment? Michele has calculated that the answer can be 42:

There's a lower incidence of rose colors in my own spectrum, but this is what I wrote at the moment of fiftyness:

In retrospect, the fears I had didn't do me much good at all, but it took me entirely too long to start clearing them out.

And actually, forty-two is quite a nice age: still young enough to care about things, but old enough to know when not to give a damn. I have a feeling Michele's going to like it. A lot.

"I yam what I yam and that's all what I yam."

Bruce grasps this concept better than most, or at least better than I do sometimes:

When Paramount took over production of the Popeye shorts from the Fleischer studios, they deemphasized his Everyman nature in favor of making him, if not exactly a superhero, certainly larger than life. Even as a kid glued to the television on Saturday morning, I objected to this sort of thing: wasn't life large enough already?

Popeye didn't need to do much. And if he never quite secured the exclusive rights to Olive Oyl, well, he was always able to deal with the occasional spate of Blutality. For him, that was quite enough.

Governor Brad Henry, stumping for a state lottery at the Oklahoma Municipal League, gave out with this howler:

I'm not philosophically opposed to a tax on stupidity, but it's a safe bet, so to speak, this is going to inflame the Thou Shalt Not Gamble crowd huddled around the slots at the Lucky Star.

Michael Blowhard reports from the marketplace:

I'm inclined to believe it's just as true at more mundane markets; last Wednesday at the neighborhood store, I was in the checkout line behind a woman who had bought a $1.29 bag of chips and had finished off roughly half of them during the five-aisle trip to the register.

She was profusely apologetic, though the clerk seemed more amused than horrified, and I tossed in a remark to the effect that "If they're that good, I should have bought some of them instead of [holding up bag] this."

More often, though, it's half-empty 20-ounce beverage bottles.

(Update, 21 August, 8 pm: Syaffolee says: "The problem, in my mind, is the reason [Blowhard and yours truly] think women do this. It is not about a woman's attitude toward food. It's about control.")

My knowledge of jazz is something less than encyclopedic; I'm not even necessarily prepared to state that I know it when I hear it. Still, there is a smattering of jazz on my shelf from a variety of periods — okay, there's a lot of Charlie Parker, mainly because I discovered Bird when I was very young — and it's been accumulated without much regard to whether Dan Morgenstern would be appalled at my lack of taste.

Mark Anderson, the American Sentimentalist, recommends "Go with what feels good to you":