The Romans used to consider October the eighth month, hence the name, and I think it fits better into the No. 8 slot, if only because it banishes February to dead last where it belongs, and I rather like the idea of the year beginning with a hint of spring instead of with a blast of winter.

But as the tenth month, October still has a role to play, splitting the difference between the last vestiges of summer and the first signs of winter. In Oklahoma, it's cool, except when it's warm, and it's damp, except when it's dry, which suggests that most years it's hard to get a grip on October. This year, I'm even less sure what to expect; May, a similarly transitional month, was exceptionally dry, but summer wound up mostly cool and wet and May-like. Cool and wet isn't great for my arthritis — and no, I've not been taking Vioxx — but I suppose I'd rather have it now than in the middle of January.

On average, the first freeze in the city shows up around the 4th of November, which is still a way off. But there's about an eight-week range: in one year — 1952 — the first freeze was October 7. (In 1998, the first freeze held off until December 8.) At least things aren't going to be dull, unless of course they are.

In 1960, radio listeners thought that Richard M. Nixon had won his debate with John F. Kennedy; the television audience, however, came down firmly on JFK's side. With this in mind, I left the TV off last night and listened to the debate on the radio.

Like most of blogdom, I didn't see hear a clear winner. Senator Kerry, I thought, did manage to turn the Smug knob down a notch or two, which surely helped. Neither candidate was operating at maximum eloquence level, though the President seemed to improve as time went on. And my mind wasn't changed: despite some serious fumbles along the way so far, I still prefer the Bush doctrine of preemption over Kerry's let's-not-make-anyone-mad approach. To swipe a line from Dave at Garfield Ridge: "One man spoke gibberish, but has a clear stance. The other man spoke clearly, but his stance is gibberish."

There is, of course, a lot more gibbering to come.

It's the Third Annual Blogger Boobie-Thon, an amazing little fundraiser for the Susan G. Komen Breast Cancer Foundation that last year brought in over $6000. This year's slogan is FIND A CURE OR AND BUST, and in return for your donation, you're entitled to a peek at the racks of some real women (and some actual guys), as distinguished from the artificially-enhanced stuff dispensed by Big Media. A pretty nice quid for your quo, I'd say.

Besides, it's October already. The year's running out and you need one more tax deduction, right? Thought so.

Once and for all: There is no rule at Pottery Barn that says "If you break it, you own it."

The Barista of Bloomfield Ave. — serving Montclair, Glen Ridge and Bloomfield — offers some alternative rules that might be pressed into service.

I was here in Oklahoma in 1982, so I remember the Great Oil Bust entirely too well. Eric Siegmund, who runs the Fire Ant Gazette from Midland, deep in the heart of the Texas oil patch, recalls the days just before:

Crude oil futures closed at $50.12 Friday on the New York Mercantile Exchange. Of course, fifty bucks today isn't the same as fifty bucks twenty-two years ago, and neither Oklahoma City nor Midland is acting cocky these days:

Jackie Cooper Imports in Oklahoma City used to carry a wide range of high-end motor cars, including both Rolls-Royce and Maserati — it was through their kind indulgence that I actually got some seat time in a Maserati in the early 80s — but today they sell only BMWs and Mini Coopers (Minis Cooper?). Seekers of hyperexpensive sleds must search elsewhere.

The mantra among producers here has been "O Lord, just one more boom, and I promise not to piss it away this time." I believe they were serious.

A botanical garden, says landscape designer Geoffrey Rausch, is like a museum — except that in the garden, the masterpieces are alive.

Conceptual plans for the Oklahoma Centennial Botanical Garden in Tulsa, to be designed by Rausch, were released this week, and a drive is already underway to raise $40 million for its construction. The garden site, 5323 West 31st Street North, covers 300 acres in the Osage Hills, and is adjacent to the Post Oak Lodge conference center. (Persimmon Ridge LLC, which owns this tract of land, has agreed to a 99-year lease at $1 to accommodate the garden.)

Proponents hope to draw 400,000 visitors a year once the garden opens in 2007, the 100th anniversary of Oklahoma statehood. I'll definitely be among them.

I get some odd email at times, but nothing quite as odd as this item sent to Michele:

Having read sixty comments on that post, I conclude that there is not.

Or I could have just looked down.

It's not a jump to the left and then a step to the right; this time we're going backward and forward.

Back in August I noted the demolition of the building at 23rd and Classen that once housed a Beverly's Restaurant, and it occurred to me this morning that it had been far too long since I'd sampled any of the wares therein.

Beverly Osborne's first restaurant, dating to 1921, was just north of the State Capitol on Lincoln Boulevard; eventually there were half a dozen across town, the last to be built being the Pancake Corner at Northwest Expressway west of Pennsylvania, which sports red floor tile almost identical to the tile on my bathroom floor. Time, attrition and urban renewal took their usual toll, and now the Pancake Corner is the only Beverly's remaining. Still, it's hard to imagine that it was much different in the Good Old Days than it is now: it's a classic diner of the old school, everything happens right up front so you can see the level of chaos for yourself, and while prices are inevitably higher, the menu and the recipes are largely unchanged. I should be in such good shape when I'm eighty-three years old.

The Harkins Theatres in Bricktown aren't even eighty-three hours old yet, but they were doing a semi-brisk business for a Saturday afternoon, perhaps because four screens (including the monster Cine Capri) were devoted to the weekend's big debut, Shark Tale. Being the sensible soul I am, I went after lunch, reasoning that the Big Bevburger ($4.95 with fries) was likely to be more substantial a meal than the $5.50 Giant Popcorn at the concession stand. (I did, however, fork over three and a quarter for a box of Raisinets, because — well, just because, okay?)

Two weeks ago I said something to the effect that I'd be surprised if they made their first-of-October opening on time, and indeed they did, but there's a reason I trust my gut: about two-thirds of the way through Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow, a section of ceiling molding and the backing material came crashing to the floor. (I suspect it says something about Sky Captain that hardly anyone noticed the crash, what with all the crashing and whatnot on screen, duly reproduced in Dolby® Digital.) The offending section was directly above an aisle, and no one in the auditorium was even close to being affected by it, but Harkins management was properly appalled, and everyone at that showing was comped with a free pass for the inconvenience suffered, while staff hurried in halfway through the credits to make the repairs.

We jump now into the realm of the timeless. A chap from a local Baptist church rang my bell this morning and handed me a package of light bulbs. (Good ones, too: GE Soft White Longlife 60-watt.) No catch: it's just part of their outreach. And, well, why not promote Eternal Light with something good for 1500 hours or so?

Sign at a Kelly-Moore paint store: 100% CARB FREE PAINT. I should certainly hope so.

And to the long cool woman in a black dress who was posing for photographs in front of, and darn near on top of, the Centennial Fountain around three o'clock: thank you, thank you, thank you. (Words fail me otherwise.)

However much we rail about the excesses and inanities of the government — or the "govment," as Huck's Pap called it — we recognize that it's not one large, monolithic operation, as noted by Francis W. Porretto:

Of late, I'd say the courts might have slipped a notch or two here and there, but otherwise this is spot-on. And I'd argue that the Feds, deep in their flinty little artificial hearts, don't think much of ATF either. Presumably by design, ATF is an organization that regulates three (well, four, actually) commodities that were thrown together seemingly at random: they have nothing in common other than the fact that some people in high places don't like them.

The DEA, of course, exists to make George Lucas, circa THX-1138, appear to be a visionary.

And please note Mr Porretto's reference to the "coercive edifice," which reminds us that all of government is coercive, though some parts are more coercive than others. And some have more legitimate claim to the consent of the governed than others: it's not at all difficult to find a correlation between the position of regard in which any segment of government is held and the strength of that claim.

This Newsday story (from AP) perplexes me somewhat.

Coretta Scott King, addressing the Portland, Maine chapter of the NAACP on the occasion of its fortieth anniversary, called for an end to the disenfranchisement of convicted felons. And I can see the sense to this: once you've paid your debt to society, as it were, you return to the outside world, where you are once again entitled to the privileges — and subject to the responsibilities — of full citizenship. I don't think anything is gained, other than a measure of petty vindictiveness, by keeping people off the voter rolls once they've served their time.

But Mrs King lost me when she, as the story reports, "[praised] Maine and Vermont as the only states which allow prison inmates to vote." No doubt these two states have their reasons, and supposedly this is the general rule among European nations, which probably impresses some people more than it impresses me. I'll happily — well, at least not grudgingly — support a measure to restore the franchise to felons once they've completed their sentences, but that's as far as I'm willing to go for now.

(Via Politopics)

By my reckoning, that's the third scariest thing you can type from the command line. (Second, of course, is format c:, while the scariest of all is fdisk, which, unless you know what you're doing, will indeed f your disk.)

Anyway, I had a bizarre failure around cluster number 13,900 on that logical drive: everything ground to a halt when reaching it. I found no virus or spyware, so I moved off everything I could, dropped to DOS — you remember DOS, don't you? — and reformatted the drive. To my surprise, the reformat turned up no bad sectors, so I have to assume that whatever files were in that cluster were so badly corrupted that nothing this side of Steve Gibson was going to read them.

I lost, by my count, three files, and two were restored from copies elsewhere, so I lost a total of one file and two hours. I'm thinking, though, that it's probably time to start pricing a new drive, maybe even a new machine for the desktop.

Tomorrow at 7 pm, Tom Coburn and Brad Carson (geez, where's Sheila Bilyeu?) will face off in a debate at the University of Central Oklahoma in Edmond. Right now, it's too early to tell whether it will be essentially a repeat of this morning's Meet the Press.

One thing will be different, though: a demonstration. Around five-thirty, persons who are fed up with the severely-limited ballot access in this state, a law worthy, says onetime Oklahoma Libertarian Party chair Chris Powell, of a "banana republic," will meet on the east side of the Nigh University Center.

You can watch the debate live on KOCO-TV (channel 5) in Oklahoma City, or listen to it over KTOK radio (1000), which presumably will have a live Internet stream as well. How much attention they'll pay to the demonstrators remains to be seen.

After a placid September, one could be forgiven for thinking that maybe we were going to escape the usual fall storm season this year.

Until about 3:50 this morning, when a single clap of thunder rattled windows for blocks and initiated the standard cacophony sequence for aftermarket car alarms, and a single lightning strike turned the black sky — well, less black.

Then came the rain, fast, then faster, then faster still. There wasn't that much of it — the National Weather Service says .08 inch at the airport, probably less than a quarter-inch up here near Deep Fork Creek — but it was enough to play havoc with the weary travelers trying to beat the dawn.

This pattern should hold for the next few days, as we make up the September rainfall deficit in less than a week.

Steve Sturm at ThoughtsOnline offers the Top Five Reasons Why Bush Will Lose. To summarize: the President, while he's ahead, isn't all that far ahead, and there's this:

This presumes that people will respond predictably to any campaign maneuver, however shabby. I'm not so sure, though I admit that the number of particularly-egregious campaign tactics that have backfired is fairly small. (Everyone hates negative campaigning; simultaneously, everyone concedes that it works.)

If anything unravels the Bush campaign, it will be complacency: John Kerry is not going to fold up and slip away into the night.

Somewhere between 60 and 70 percent of the trees in Houston's residential neighborhoods are live oaks, which is fine if you like live oaks, possibly troublesome if you're a tree expert.

"Only 10 percent should be one species," says urban forester Charles Burditt. "Otherwise, a disease or other catastrophic event could wipe out a large percentage of your trees."

Do I get any points for diversity? I have a cottonwood, an evergreen or two, twin redbuds, and a couple of elms that are not at all well.

(Via BlogHOUSTON)

It's a fairly safe bet that Dale Earnhardt Jr. will be socked with a 25-point penalty and a $10,000 fine for an expletive he uttered in Victory Row at the EA Sports 500 yesterday; there is apparently ample precedent should NASCAR decide to do so.

Did Janet — Miss Jackson if you're nasty — really cause all this?

After discovering that it would cost over $700 to fly from Tulsa to Springfield, Illinois and back, the OkiePundit has had it up to here with the airlines:

We're a little better off at this end of the turnpike — to the Illinois capital and back can be swung here for a smidgen under $300 — but my regard for the hub system, never all that substantial, completely evaporated when they told me once upon a time that I'd have to change planes in Houston to fly to Philadelphia. (And actually, that price can be beat from Tulsa if you buy far enough in advance, but you'd still have to change at Chicago O'Hare and then backtrack to Springfield, which strikes me as just slightly insane.)

Of course, regular readers know I'd just as soon drive, even all the way to Philly, but that's a different issue entirely.

Dawn Eden, scourge of Planned Parenthood, evaluating where things stand:

Which fear perhaps explains their desperate attempts to influence the electorate without jeopardizing their 501(c)(3) status.

(Update, 11:30 am: Someone got to this page with the implausible — to me, anyway — search string "how to end a pregnancy kill the fetus". Sheesh.)

Barbs, accusations, counteraccusations, and more barbs — what more could you want? Last night's Tom Coburn-Brad Carson debate was wild and woolly, more heat than light, but the candidates did manage to stake out some differences in position.

Best barb, in my opinion, by Carson: "We've sent people to Washington who did nothing for Oklahoma. But we've never sent anyone to Washington, D.C., who makes doing nothing for us their platform."

The candidates will debate again on the 25th of October in Pace Auditorium at Tulsa Community College.

If these apply to you, you just might be a Floridian.

• You exhibit a slight twitch when introduced to anyone with the first names of Charley, Frances, Ivan or Jeanne.

• Your freezer never has more than $20 worth of food in it at any given time.

• You're looking at paint swatches for the plywood on your windows to accent the house color.

• You think of your hall closet/saferoom as "cozy."

• Your pool is more accurately described as "framed in" than "screened in."

• Your freezer in the garage now has only homemade ice in it.

• You no longer worry about relatives visiting during the summer months.

• You, too, haven't heard back from the insurance adjuster.

• You now understand what that little "2% hurricane deductible" phrase really means.

• You're putting together a collage on your driveway of roof shingles from your neighborhood.

• You were once proud of your 16" electric chainsaw.

• You now own 5 large ice chests.

• You recognize people in line at the free ice, gas and plywood locations.

• You stop what you're doing and clap and wave when you see a convoy of power company trucks come down your street.

• You're depressed when they don't stop.

• You have the personal cell phone numbers of the managers for plywood, roofing supplies and generators at Home Depot on your speed dialer.

• You've spent more than $20 on "tall white kitchen bags" to make your own sand bags.

• You're considering upgrading your 16" to a 20" chainsaw.

• You know what "bar chain oil" is.

• You're thinking of getting your wife the hardhat with the ear protector and face shield for your anniversary.

• You now think the $6,000 whole house generator seems reasonable.

• You look forward to discussions about the merits of "cubed, block and dry ice."

• You ask your family and friends up north to start saving the Sunday Real Estate classifieds.
  

You know, Tornado Alley doesn't seem so bad all of a sudden.

Dynamo Dave Sherman has been doing this for four freaking years, man.

Seems like there ought to be some kind of tenure awarded at this point, doesn't there?

This has nothing to do with Anna or with Silflay Hraka.

But, you know, it could.

(Via Fishbucket)

Evan Williams put it this way:

In other words: having decided that Blogger is in good hands, Ev will sever his ties to Google at the end of this week.

What's he going to do? Not sure:

And has there been a falling-out of some sort? Apparently not:

Good luck, Ev.

(Tilt of the sombrero to Eric Siegmund.)

A moment of silence, please, for Rodney Dangerfield, who died today in Los Angeles at the age of eighty-two.

Out of respect, of course.

As the numbers get higher, it gets harder to come up with cute titles for them.

Fortunately, the enterprising souls who host Carnival of the Vanities have no problem making the weekly Best of the Blogs series both readable and visually appealing, and that's certainly true of Beck, who hosts week #107 at Incite for your reading and clicking pleasure.

Okay, I admit it: I blew off the vice-presidential debate. Didn't pay the slightest bit of attention to it.

I blame this partly on John Nance Garner, who observed famously that the vice-presidency wasn't worth "a warm bucket of spit," assuming "spit" is what he really said, and partly on general indifference to the candidates. The Democrats have somehow managed to paint John Edwards as Bill Clinton with a chastity belt, and if Dick Cheney is truly pulling Dubya's strings, someone at a disclosed location (Hi, Karl!) is tugging on Cheney's.

If you care about this more than I do, and you'd almost have to, you can get the consensus of blogdom from Allah.

The image of the Avon Lady — neat, upright, unpretentious, pretty but not drop-dead gorgeous — is practically indelible, despite Avon's efforts in recent years to jazz up the product line. And I mean some fairly smooth jazz, too: if you've seen any of the recent biweekly campaign catalogs, you know that alongside the usual arrays of powders and moisturizers and lipsticks, they're vending some sort-of-sexy lingerie, not exactly Victoria's Secret, but not flannel and muslin either. It gets worse in March and April as they hawk this stuff for Mother's Day, which always leaves me with a serious case of cognitive dissonance: I can imagine it on Stacy's mom, I guess, but my mom wouldn't ever have gotten near it.

Still, I'm just this side of 51 years old; I can deal with images of scantily-clad (or less) women. I'm quite certain I couldn't when I was ten. And I really don't think it's a good idea to have grade-school kids trying to sell this kind of material for classroom fund-raising; it's probably less fattening than your average World's Finest chocolate bar, but kids are already getting overwhelmed with sexual stuff way before they're ready for it, and besides, what does your average Little League shortstop know about sun-protection factors anyway? Gimme back my Avon Lady.

Well, they're not that specific, but Easy Street Motorsports is looking for a female driver for their ESX Subaru WRX STi on the 2005 race circuit. Salary is $40k, augmented by the usual sponsorship money, plus a full scholarship to Frank Hawley's NHRA Drag Racing School.

Qualifications?

Um, yeah.

(Via Jalopnik)

I am indeed blessed: not only did the Oklahoma Gazette render all my quotes accurately, but mindful of space (or taste) considerations, they snipped out my photo.

Besides, Michael Bates is much better-looking.

(The Gazette puts only a fraction of the complete article online, so you'll have to snag a copy of the dead-tree version to, as the phrase goes, Read The Whole Thing.)

Bill Whittle. Read. Now.

Surely somebody copied down the URL on page 23.

Incidentally, I told Deborah Benjamin there were two blogs in this state that were far better than mine at political coverage; to her everlasting credit, she talked to both those guys. (Of course, she may have talked to them long before she ever got down to my spot on the list.)

Previous coverage and snarky comments are here.

Same old place as it ever was: on the line. For OU-Texas weekend, the governors of the states have a "friendly" wager on the outcome of the game, and traditionally it's been a side of beef.

This year, there were protests. Vegetarian groups in central Oklahoma and in Austin, Texas asked that the bet be revised, and indeed in 2003 Governor Henry had put up 150 lb of corn meal instead of the usual grill fodder. Not this time.

And really, an event billed as the "Red River Shootout" is no place for arugula, if you ask me.

Walter Williams, as quoted by La Shawn Barber:

I understand the rationale for this sort of thing: should a student not flunk out as a freshman, there's a chance he'll be back as a sophomore. If that were the only objective, though, it would be easier just to pass every freshman routinely and be done with it. But apparently Dr Swinton takes this stuff seriously: Williams quotes a report in The State to the effect that two instructors were sacked for not adjusting their grades by Swinton's fudge factor.

I grew up in South Carolina, a state which is not renowned for its academic brilliance, but a state which, at least when I was there, was willing to hammer on its students to get them to learn this stuff already. It is disheartening to see Benedict, an historically black college with a 130-year track record, shifting its emphasis away from academics and toward the politics of self-esteem; it's hard to see how SEE is going to contribute positively to the task of turning out graduates who are "powers for good in society".

In lower case, for now, because he's only one day old.

Say hello to Baby Xrlq, of whom pictures are promised Real Soon Now. (Of course, the proud parents are no doubt, um, otherwise occupied right this minute.)

I know, I spend a lot of space on New Jersey stuff here, but let's face it: New Jersey manages to provide a whole lot of bizarre stories, and as far as Big Media are concerned, which isn't much, New Jersey and Oklahoma are in a dead heat for National Laughingstock, and stories like this give me a chance to, um, play favorites.

The Newark Housing Authority will assume responsibility for the construction of the city's downtown sports-arena complex.

This ought to be interesting, what with Authority director Harold Lucas under HUD scrutiny for managing to spend upward of $400,000 in a year and a half to renovate the Authority's offices, including a plasma TV for his own inner sanctum.

Amusingly, there will be a board empaneled to oversee the NHA's oversight of the arena. From his vantage point at Pavement Narrows, the Prop asks:

Newark Mayor Sharpe James will be on the oversight board. He's quite excited about the new facility, which he says will mean a "new image for Newark." Given the nature of Garden State politics, I suspect not even a new mayor will be able to give Newark a new image.

Obligatory Oklahoma comparison: The 18,000-seat Newark arena will cost, says the city, no more than $210 million. The proposed new arena in Tulsa, with similar seating capacity, carries a $125-million price tag (the oft-quoted $183 million includes the cost of renovating the Convention Center). Oklahoma City's Ford Center, with 2,000 more seats, took a shade under $88 million to build.

(Dear Susanna: Aren't you just tickled pink to be in Alabama these days instead of New Jersey?)

The word hasn't made it to the city Web site yet, but they're putting it out in the City News utility-bill insert: you can now pay Oklahoma City utility bills at the zoo.

Really. Seven days a week, 9 to 5, the Oklahoma City Zoo's Guest Services Counter will take your check or money order in payment of your utility bill, assuming it's current. What's more, they're reserving a couple of parking spaces near the zoo entrance for utility customers.

In another development, the Municipal Court will now take plastic for city fines, in person or over the phone during business hours, and won't even charge you a service fee.

Eventually, they really need to unite all these functions and make them payable at okc.gov. (Right now, only traffic tickets can be paid over the Web.) But I can wait.

There's a new scholarship at Michigan State University, available to a student of color who qualifies as lesbian, bisexual, gay or transsexual. Lajoya Johnson, who arranged for the scholarship and is now raising funds for it, says she hopes the scholarship will help make more LBGT students of color want to come to East Lansing. (I always thought the abbreviation was GLBT, but then I'm out of the loop on matters of this sort.)

This sort of thing is fine with me; I mean, a perfunctory search through some schools' financial-aid offices will turn up scholarships with requirements even more specific than just being nonwhite and nonstraight, and I'm not about to complain about them. I did, however, find something odd in this comment by the university's LBGT rep:

Which is no doubt true, but: families of origin? Didn't all of us (Adam and Eve excepted) originate in families? What did I miss here?

Meanwhile, Dawn Eden proposes sauce for the gander:

I suspect this would go over better than, say, if I proposed to endow a chair in NASCAR Studies at Bryn Mawr, but the world continues to surprise me.

Mike Horshead researches a question it didn't occur to you or me to ask: What is the correct pronunciation of M & M?

Don't laugh. This is undoubtedly a matter of serious interest in Hackettstown and along 8 Mile Road.

Former OU football coach/demigod Barry Switzer has endorsed Brad Carson for Senate, an announcement which is far more important than I think it deserves to be; I was seriously thinking about not mentioning it here, but Wilson Research Strategies, which has been handicapping the Senate race, says that 16 percent of voters who chose Brad Henry for governor in 2002 said that Switzer's endorsement had influenced their choice. So Barry carries a lot of weight, even today; Chris Wilson of WRS says that "it's probably the second-best endorsement you could get, after Bob Stoops."

Bob Stoops had no comment, but John Hart of the Tom Coburn campaign sniffed, "Barry Switzer has a track record of endorsing liberal trial lawyers."

With two days still to go, the 2004 Blogger Boobie-Thon has exceeded last year's total; as of about an hour ago, the total in hand was $7066. (With 140 donors listed, this means that the average donation is right around fifty bucks.)

I'm sure there's some way I can urge you guys to donate without telling you to, um, put your money where your mouth is.

The Tulsa World points out in an editorial today [link requires Adobe Reader] that Brad Carson got the highest possible rating from Americans for Better Immigration, a group which seeks to reduce the number of immigrants; Tom Coburn, on the other hand, received a less-than-mediocre D-plus.

There's just one problem here: it's not true. Had anyone from the World bothered to read ABI's ratings in full — which Michael Bates actually did — it would have been excruciatingly obvious that both Carson and Coburn got exactly the same overall rating: a B-plus. And it's not like the details are hidden away; even without using Bates' links, I was able to find the scorecards in a matter of seconds.

What's really weird is that the editorial wasn't intended to cast a pleasing light on Carson, but to castigate the Republican National Committee for a Coburn ad about immigration; the ABI scorecards were merely a sideshow. Yet the World was perfectly willing to go on the attack with a complete misstatement of ABI's positions. What were they thinking? As lapses in editorial judgment go, this is so utterly amazing that I have to wonder if the World has been raiding CBS News to staff its editorial board.

Michael Crane has compiled a monster of a book called The Political Junkie Handbook, billed as "The Definitive Reference Book on Politics," 600-odd pages of facts, figures and whatnot, selling for $30 (quantity rates apply if you buy 5 or more). In an effort to draw attention to it, Crane apparently sent excerpts to some of us who are hard-up to fill blog space every morning, with the note "Please share this interesting information with your readers."

Fair enough. What I got was a list of a dozen lifetime ratings given to Senator John Kerry by various organizations, six liberal and six conservative, and judging by my spot-checks of a couple of them, converted from letter grades to numbers as needed. I figured I would arrange these in order of ascending rating, which presumably would therefore arrange the organizations in order of descending conservatism. (Ties are listed alphabetically.) Without further ado:

•     0: Chamber of Commerce (2003 rating only)
  
•     0: Family Research Council
  
•     5: American Conservative Union
  
•   10: Gun Owners of America
  
•   14: National Taxpayers Union
  
•   25: Citizens Against Government Waste
  
•   85: Public Citizen
  
•   92: Americans for Democratic Action
  
• 100: American Association of University Professors
  
• 100: Coalition to Stop Gun Violence
  
• 100: Human Rights Campaign
  
• 100: NARAL
  

Inasmuch as the National Rifle Association has worked diligently to portray Kerry as the right-hand man of the Antichrist — okay, that's a slight exaggeration — I was curious to see how Gun Owners of America, which is by most accounts a harder-nosed group than the NRA, managed to find ten points for him. And from their current Senate ratings page, I conclude that they figure he could be worse: he may vote against their interests all the time, but at least he doesn't introduce anti-gun measures. This undoubtedly is how Kerry gets an F, while Ted Kennedy, who does sponsor stuff like that, gets an F-minus.

There aren't any real surprises in this list, to be sure. But it's useful, I think, to look at the whole ball of wax at once, especially if your opinions, like mine, veer in from all over the spectrum.

Allah has the usual roundup from blogdom.

I had the debate on the radio and was half-watching one of my chat rooms, and to my surprise, some of the women in the room began taking up the candidates' talking points instead of the ostensible room topic. And things did get fairly spirited for a while, though a few of the guys bailed out rather quickly, perhaps sensing that their hopes of attracting the attention of one of those women were even fainter than usual. I tossed in a remark or two from time to time, but by and large, they were doing a pretty thorough job of reenacting the scene in St. Louis.

I hesitate to extrapolate from such a small sample — the room only holds 36, and only a fraction of them were participating actively — but at that moment, it looked to me as though those "security moms" for Bush might well include a substantial number of women who actually aren't moms. Which means, I suppose, that it's about time for the Democrats to deny that they exist at all.

On the south side of the campus of St. Gregory's University, a small (850 students) Benedictine school in Shawnee, Oklahoma, is the Mabee-Gerrer Museum of Art, founded in 1914 by Father Gregory Gerrer, a Benedictine monk and an artist in his own right.

It's always worth the half-hour trip (35 miles, but traffic on I-40 tends to move at close to 80 mph once you're past Tinker Air Force Base) from the city to Mabee-Gerrer, but this year they have something literally unique: Unveiling Ancient Mystery: Etruscan Treasures, the first-ever showing of 225 pieces of jewelry from the collection of Count Vittorio Cini (1885-1977), passed down to his daughter Yana and made available by her husband, Prince Fabrizio Alliata di Montereale.

In addition to the Alliata-Cini collection, Etruscan Treasures features items that were imported to Etruria from other Mediterranean venues — Greece, Egypt, Mesopotamia — that inspired the Etruscans' own artifacts. (For instance, to supplement an image of an Etruscan sarcophagus, there's an actual Egyptian sarcophagus from the museum's permanent collection.) There are workaday items and luxuries, reproductions of typical clothing based upon statuary, everything you'd want from a serious archaeological dig.

But the exhibition inevitably is dominated by the jewelry: small, intricately detailed, constructed with incredible precision using highly-sophisticated techniques. (A local jewelrymaker who contributes to the Antenna Audio tour program has actually duplicated some of the pieces; the reproductions can be bought at the museum at prices which reflect the difficulty of the task.) I quote from the catalog ($27.50) description of one piece in the collection:

And they were doing this around 350 BC, mind you.

Of course, the greatest Etruscan mystery is "Where did they go?" We know that Etruria, whose borders correspond roughly with those of present-day Tuscany, eventually became part of the Roman Empire, and we are learning that some vaunted Roman innovations were derived (or blatantly copied) from Etruscan work. The exhibit is a celebration of Etruscan culture at its best, but it's also a grim reminder that no civilization, however sophisticated, lasts forever.

Unveiling Ancient Mystery: Etruscan Treasures runs through the end of October at Mabee-Gerrer. It's a national exclusive: this is the only place in the entire country to see this exhibit. And unsurprisingly, the museum register records visitors from all 50 states. (New Hampshire, says the front desk, was the last.) If you're anywhere in the vicinity, or even if you're not, it's worth the trip.

Prices for Oklahoma crude oil generally lag behind the oft-quoted New York Mercantile Exchange rates for the OPEC stuff, but $50 a barrel has come to the Oklahoma oil patch, and activity is starting to pick up as a result.

And it's perfectly obvious why: a well capable of producing a mere two barrels a day, about average for the state these days, is good for $3000 a month now, justifying the expense to force it out of the ground. (The standard barrel is 42 gallons.)

The days of the "wild wells," of course, are gone forever; we're not going to see a repeat of the No. 1 Mary Sudik, which blew out in the spring of 1930 and spewed oil all over central Oklahoma for eleven days before being brought under control. No one knows for sure how much "Wild Mary" actually coughed up, but it's estimated she was peaking near 3,000 barrels an hour. Present-day oilfield equipment can handle these higher pressures; of course, with the fields largely played out, it's now necessary to force higher pressures into the wells to squeeze out a barrel or two. It wasn't worth it at $10 or $15 a barrel: the costs exceeded the potential revenue.

The state eventually figured out that its 7-percent Gross Production Tax wasn't helping matters, and in 1998 reset the tax to a variable rate based upon the price of crude. A similar structure applies to natural gas production, and gas prices are similarly high: Oklahoma Natural Gas advises that the stuff they piped into my house this month cost them $6.02 per dekatherm, a dekatherm being equal to 1 million British Thermal Units.

With prices where they've been lately, the state is able to levy the full 7-percent tax; in fiscal year 2004, which ended 30 June, the Gross Production Tax brought in $560 million, about $100 million more than had been projected, a small but definite boon to Oklahoma's ongoing budget woes, and this was before the huge run-up in oil prices. It's this sort of thing that keeps me from gritting my teeth as I spend $24 to fill up my car (figuring 12.9 gallons, at which point the orange Low Fuel light has just come on, at $1.86).

The death of French philosopher Jacques Derrida reminded me of this January 2003 piece wherein I tried to find some common ground between deconstructionism and the blog technique known as "fisking."

Since undoubtedly Derrida will be mourned in academic circles, I'm happy to reprint this observation in NRO by Mark Goldblatt on the arrival of a documentary film about Derrida, which inspired my original post in the first place. (I didn't quote as much of it the first time around.)

(Adjustment of hat angle motivated by Michelle Malkin.)

I've set up a section in the navigation column specifically for The Vent: it contains a link (with number, title and date) of the newest edition, plus a link to the complete index. For those of you who also peek into that area, this will at least tell you up front when the updates occur.

I've always suspected that the SAT is important largely because ETS says it is, and I'd take these numbers with a grain of salt even if they didn't come with the disclaimer that "many of these scores are unverified."

For the record, I took it twice in high school, back in the Pleistocene era, and both times I scored between Scott McNealy and Rush Limbaugh.

(Via Bill Quick, who scored similarly.)

It's a step beyond serendipity: the ability to claim credit for an innovation that requires you to do nothing at all.

Tulsa's KOTV, channel 6, is now promoting its Online Audio at its Web site, and you don't even need to be online to listen to it: just tune your FM radio to 87.7 MHz.

Under FCC rules, an analog TV channel covers a bandwidth of 6 MHz; channel 6 runs from 82 to 88 MHz. The color subcarrier is generally located 1.25 MHz from the bottom of the channel, or at 83.25 MHz.

TV video is AM. TV audio, however, is FM, and the FM subcarrier is located 4.5 MHz above the video subcarrier in all TV channels. On channel 6 in Tulsa, or indeed channel 6 anywhere in the US or Canada, this means 87.75 MHz. (Actually, some stations, including KOTV, are required by the FCC to offset their subcarriers by 0.01 MHz, so the actual FM audio from KOTV is at 87.76 MHz.) This signal is well within the reach of any FM receiver within transmitter range which can be tuned to approximately 87.7, and KOTV didn't have to do anything extra to provide it; it's a by-product of the way the spectrum is assigned. Any station on channel 6 should be similarly accessible.

On a hunch, I spot-checked three stations I knew to be on channel 6 — in Corpus Christi, Miami and Philadelphia — and none of them was promoting an FM-audio feed on the front page of its Web site.

October, says Planned Parenthood, is "October is National Campaign for Healthier Babies Month," and, well, who can argue with that?

Consonant with this month's theme, the organization is calling your attention to their articles in the "Having a Healthy Baby" series, which opens, logically enough, with Planning Your Pregnancy. It's a good-enough exposition of its type, though Dawn Eden notes that they missed one major point.

As Tulsa wrestles with trying to lure people downtown, Michael Bates explains what it takes:

We've figured this out down here. Oklahoma City has increased its police presence in Bricktown and has installed a police substation in a rented storefront, pending the completion of a full-time police building on East Main. The Walnut Avenue bridge is closed for now, but will be rebuilt. And if you'd rather not walk all over Bricktown, there's always the trolley.

Of course, we provide places where you can feel a sense of danger in your car, too: just try to get through the Pennsylvania Avenue/Memorial Road/Kilpatrick Turnpike intersection.

Public radio has an impressively-diverse collection of voices, from avuncular and garrulous Garrison Keillor to studiously-pinched Diane Rehm, from cheerful yenta Susan Stamberg to gruff Carl Kasell. What they all have in common, of course, is that they're all professionals, and they all sound like it. (Don't even mention Click and Clack, the Tappet Brothers.)

However, not every voice on public radio is that of a professional, as Wendy reports:

There aren't any real fingernails-on-the-blackboard voices on our local public-radio stations, though KGOU manager Karen Holp comes closest: there's always the sensation that she's just gotten to the bottom of her box of Cracker Jack and inexplicably didn't find a Coupe de Ville hiding therein.

John Rosenberg rips this tale from the very headlines:

He has, of course, a plan.

But I'm inclined to think that it may not matter come November.

Andrew Sullivan? Not necessarily.

And really, do we even need one? The Professor recommended one of those weekly compendia with "You may find some blogs you like better than this one!" and caught flak for it. His response merits repeating:

Having been around forever, or at least comparatively so, I'm a firm believer in spreading the wealth, or the linkage, or whatever it is we cast upon the waters around these parts; while it is literally impossible to read every single blog — there aren't enough hours in a day even to type in the URLs — you don't get the full benefit of the collective wisdom (if that's the term) by sticking to two or three of the brand-name bloggers. That Gazette article last week highlighted four Oklahoma blogs and listed a handful of others, and while I certainly appreciate whatever traffic I got from it, I think it's important to look around for other voices. Bruce and Mike perform a valuable public service by providing linkage to dozens of Oklahoma blogs, and as I said in the Gazette piece, "There's always room for another soapbox." I suspect Glenn Reynolds would agree.

What's the difference between democracy in Afghanistan and democracy in Oklahoma?

According to Mike at Okiedoke, it's about 9 to 1.

More precisely, 18 to 2.

Everything I've read and heard tells me that John Kerry takes his religious faith seriously; he has, to be sure, some substantial differences with official Catholic doctrine, but I'm not inclined to accuse him of apostasy.

Still, Kerry's appearance at a predominantly-black Baptist church in Miami strikes me as at least somewhat cynical. As Susanna Cornett notes:

And "demonizing" is an important word here, says John Rosenberg:

There is, I submit, froth on both sides of the aisle.

(Update, 13 October, 7:30 am: La Shawn Barber looks at Kerry's pulpit pitch from a Biblical point of view.)

A fellow named Pouncer left this as a comment at Stephen Green's place, and it's as good an explanation as I expect to see about how it is that some of us, George W. Bush included, don't get upset by the presumably-derisive use of the term "cowboy":

Thank you, Pouncer. (And thanks to Mark Twain, for A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, a book which I have read somewhere between twenty and sixty times in the last 50 years.)

The Houston Comical Chronicle managed this howler in this morning's dead-tree edition:

The online copy has been fixed, but anybody who reads the Chronicle's editorial page — assuming someone actually does read the Chronicle's editorial page — will witness this bit of sloppiness.

(Via BlogHOUSTON, which did.)

Gwyneth Paltrow, in whom I have entirely too much interest after having seen Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow, caught a fair amount of flak for naming her daughter "Apple".

Well, at least it's better than "@".

(Via Fark)

The end of the FM dial (well, actually 107.9), but nowhere near the end of the Carnival of the Vanities, the 108th edition of which is presented by Conservative Dialysis. Waste no time getting there to read it.

Anticipating the possibility that the Democrats might retake the White House, Eric Siegmund presents the revised (since Tom Ridge will be gone) Kerryland Nuisance Advisory System.

It's, like, so nuanced.

What is most interesting, I think, about this list of Green Party positions on this fall's ballot initiatives, is that it's deliberately incomplete; on three of the nine State Questions, the party will "make no statement." J. M. Branum explains:

Which is fine with me. There's no compelling reason why a political party should have a stance on every conceivable issue.

Mr Branum notes further:

He cites SQ 713 as a particularly heinous example, and indeed 713, which raises the tobacco tax while cutting the top rate of the income tax, is a powerful argument for the metaphor of legislation as sausage.

Vandals tagged Brad Carson's Tulsa campaign office at 1404 S. Utica with graffiti Sunday night; among the inscriptions were "Carson lies" and "Leave Tulsa alone" and, perhaps most horrifying, "liberal".

The vandalism was discovered Monday morning; campaign volunteers have been scraping off the graffiti.

"Froth on both sides of the aisle," I said.

The documentary film Stolen Honor: Wounds that Never Heal has been picked up by the 62-station Sinclair Broadcast Group for broadcast in late October, a fact which has drawn fire from Big Media — even though Sinclair is pretty Big Media itself — and has brought threats of retaliation from supporters of John Kerry, who is, shall we say, unflatteringly portrayed in the film.

As tempests go, this one won't fill a teapot; perhaps a thimble is more appropriate. Much has been made of the fact that Sinclair stations operate in areas containing 24 percent of the viewing audience, which is true. On the other hand, around 90 percent of said audience has access to, say, CBS television, which has had no apparent qualms about acting on behalf of the Kerry campaign.

And yes, Sinclair has stations in swing states. They also have stations in California, New York and Massachusetts, states which are almost certainly going to cast their electoral votes for Kerry, and stations in Texas, Oklahoma and the Carolinas, states which are a virtual lock for Bush. In none of those states will the broadcast of Stolen Honor have any substantial effect on the election.

What's more, in none of the markets in which Sinclair operates does it command a majority of the audience. In Oklahoma City, KOKH-TV, a Fox affiliate, does well, and KOCB-TV is claimed to be the highest-rated affiliate of The WB, but the combination of the two doesn't draw anywhere near 50 percent of the local TV audience. Nor does Sinclair operate in any markets where they have two of the Big Four network affiliates: this is forbidden by FCC rules.

This isn't the first time that Sinclair drew political heat. Back on 30 April, Sinclair's ABC affiliates did not carry ABC's Nightline program, which was given over to a reading of the names of servicemen killed in the war in Iraq; Sinclair claimed the broadcast "appear[ed] to be motivated by a political agenda designed to undermine the efforts of the United States in Iraq." [Complete text reproduced here.] There was the inevitable wailing and gnashing of teeth. Still, only seven stations were affected, and ABC's ubiquitous radio network carried excerpts from the program; it strikes me as unlikely that a large number of people counted themselves as deprived as a result of Sinclair's actions.

I do quarrel with Sinclair's apparent belief that following a 45-minute film with a 15-minute panel discussion qualifies it as a "news event," exempt from FCC regulations or from McCain-Feingold. The Democratic National Committee has already said that it plans to file a complaint, claiming the broadcast is the equivalent of a contribution to Bush/Cheney. Still, how likely is it that the Democratic National Committee would object to, say, Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11 being broadcast before the election? "It depends on the, um, you know, on the circumstances," said DNC counsel Joe Sandler, who quickly pointed out that Moore is an "established, legitimate, documentary filmmaker," dismissing Stolen Honor producer Carlton Sherwood as a "disgraced former reporter." Sherwood, incidentally, won a Peabody Award and was a member of a Gannett team that won a Pulitzer. I should be so disgraced.

Sinclair is taking comments on the matter.

Prognosis: The day before the election, this whole thing will have been forgotten. I can hardly wait.

Bylaw 210(e) is part of the agreement a bank signs with Visa to be able to issue Visa cards. MasterCard's "Competitive Programs Policy" is similar. Both these clauses say basically the same thing: you can offer Visa and/or MasterCard, but no other credit cards.

In 1998, American Express, having been rebuffed in an effort to sign up banks to issue Amex cards, managed to persuade the Department of Justice that these policies were anticompetitive, and the government duly sued.

Three years later, the government won its case: Southern District of New York Judge Barbara Jones ruled that the policies violated antitrust laws. Visa and MasterCard appealed the decision, MasterCard arguing that American Express was not being denied access to customers by these policies. The 2nd District Court of Appeals upheld Judge Jones earlier this year. And the Supreme Court has now declined to hear further appeals, meaning American Express and Discover are now free to contract with banks.

MBNA, the third-largest card issuer (the merged Chase/Bank One is first, followed by Citibank), had already negotiated a deal to issue American Express cards, pending resolution of the suits, and they're ready to go after new and presumably upscale customers.

I mean, I could really get behind this.

Update, 14 October, 7:15 am:

You may say I'm a dreamer, but I'm not the only one.

At 5 pm today, there will be a Ballot Access Forum at Oklahoma City University, featuring Thom Holmes, Rachel Jackson and Chris Powell, from the Constitution, Green and Libertarian parties respectively.

The forum will be held in Room 102 of the Sarkeys Law Center on the OCU campus. It's free, and it's open to the public.

I'm inclined to think that Kerry did well, but Bush was just a fraction better. Since the conventional wisdom holds that domestic issues are Kerry's turf, this has to be reckoned as a Bush win, though not a decisive one.

Number of hearts and/or minds changed at Surlywood: 0

Mike at Okiedoke has compiled from OSHA records a list of the most dangerous workplaces in Oklahoma.

What makes them "dangerous"? OSHA sent this letter to some 13,000 employers using these criteria:

No place I have ever worked in this state appears on this list. There do seem to be a lot of nursing homes and Wal-Mart stores, though.

This Kerryism from last night's debate seems to demand further examination:

Well, they wouldn't actually reach that presumably-happy plus-3800 state until the last year of the phase-in, but that's a quibble.

And yes, $5.15 seems absurd in the context of today, but where do you stop? Jacob Sullum follows it to its logical conclusion:

I certainly wouldn't object to being paid $100 an hour, but I think it's fair to assume it's not going to happen in my lifetime. And somehow I suspect that if the minimum wage were raised to $100, prices would rather quickly jump upwards to cover the increased costs of labor, and what's more, the recipients thereof would be in a much higher tax bracket.

<fantasy scenario>
"Are you better off today?" As I pull two slices from my $35 loaf of store-brand bread and slap them with a dollop of peanut butter ($49.95 for a ten-ounce jar, and it's not even crunchy, fercrissake), I'm inclined to say No.
</fantasy scenario>

Now that I think about it, the last time my taxes were cut, I made sure the proceeds were cycled back through the economy. And I'd be happy to do it again, though I don't expect to get anything like $3800 a year from the next Bush administration — or anything at all should Kerry be elected.

The local GOP is now issuing dual yard signs: they're the same size as the standard-issue signs, but they carry both Bush/Cheney and Tom Coburn indicia. I caught two of them this evening within a mile of each other. Are the Republicans (or, for that matter, the Democrats) doing something like this in other areas?

Oklahoma Attorney General Drew Edmondson has told the Associated Press that the filing of the Medicaid reimbursement form for Dr Tom Coburn's 1990 operations on Angela Plummer constituted "fraud," though no charges will be filed as the statute of limitations has expired.

Coburn treated Plummer's ectopic pregnancy by removing both her Fallopian tubes, even though only one was affected, leaving her sterile. Since Medicaid did not pay for sterilization procedures for patients under twenty-one years of age — Plummer was twenty — Coburn reported only the removal of the tube containing the embryo.

Edmondson says that had Coburn described his actions in full, he would have received no reimbursement from Medicaid, and that his omission was intended to make sure he "got paid for something that he would not have been paid for had he submitted the claim accurately."

Plummer eventually filed suit against Coburn, claiming she had never consented to the sterilization, but did not pursue the matter.

Meanwhile, Coburn's rival for a hotly-contested Senate seat, Brad Carson, is already running ads waving the "fraud" description around.

Persuaded as I am that wording treatment descriptions in the way that pries the most money out of insurance companies is a true 21st-century art form, I'm inclined to dismiss Edmondson's claims as so much white noise. On the other hand, Coburn's deposition, in which he states that he had asked Plummer not to discuss the sterilization with Medicaid, is more troubling, at least to me.

(If you'd just as soon not go through NewsOK.com, the Carson campaign has posted the entire AP story here.)

At least one reader close to home is reporting that this site is coming through piecemeal at best. Admittedly, this is probably appropriate — heaven knows I've had enough half-baked and otherwise incomplete ideas posted here — but I would like to know if anyone else is experiencing more than the usual trouble getting here.

John Kerry wants you to know that he is a hunter.

Someone ought to ask him stuff like this at a campaign stop:

• What is the fee for a hunting license in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts?

• When is black bear season?

• What is the bag limit for ruffed grouse?
  

(Answers are here and here; second link requires Adobe Reader.)

If you're an alternative-fuels kind of person, you should be thrilled at $53 oil, says Rammer:

OG&E reports that after one year of operation, 3,000 customers are buying 100 percent of their electricity from a wind farm, and 6,000 others are buying a fraction thereof. (Disclosure: I committed to buying 7200 kwh a year; through early October I have used 5600 kwh, which puts me pretty close to the 100-percent mark for the full twelve months.)

Other methods aren't quite so close to competitiveness yet, but:

The world moves on, irrespective of cartels or of campaign promises.

The Musée Jacques Chirac, located in the village of Sarran in the Limoges region, collects some five thousand objects given to the French president by foreign dignitaries and, um, other persons. What it's not collecting is revenue: attendance has dropped from 67,000 in 2001 to 37,000 in 2003. At £2.70 a head, the museum's accumulated deficit should be paid off sometime around the twelfth of never.

Greg Hlatky offers a suggestion:

Maybe the UN will concoct an Oil-For-Museum-Passes program.

I have never felt that it was my obligation to contribute (if that's the word) as much money as possible to the government: while I'm not going to file a false tax return, I'm also not going to shy away from every last exemption and deduction and exclusion I can legitimately claim.

Which apparently is also the policy of Teresa Heinz Kerry, who managed in 2003 to reduce her Federal tax liability to 12.47 percent. (Disclosure: My own tax bill, on about 0.78 percent as much income, was 10.69 percent.) In the light of John Kerry's faux-populist sentiments these days, his wife has come under fire for paying so little in Federal tax; I would argue that the flaw, if flaw it be, is in the tax system itself, not in Mrs Kerry's presumably-legal gaming thereof.

As would Fritz Schranck:

And a good argument for the so-called Fair Tax, as well.

Well, not all ages, obviously:

An idea by Eugene Volokh, from the draft of a textbook on the First Amendment, as quoted (except as noted) in the Marginalia section of Playboy (November 2004).

(For myself, I think the most immediate effect of the development of this theoretical software is that bloggers of the female persuasion would quit posting pictures of themselves. Damn the bad luck.)

This series has gotten to the point where it's almost not unpopular, which suggests that I maybe should give it its own category. Which I did, at least for a while.

Heritage Park Mall, on the west side of Midwest City (which is on the east side of the county), has been a rather gloomy place for years now. Built for three and a half anchor tenants, they've had to make do with two: Service Merchandise, in the "half" spot, has now closed all its retail stores, and Montgomery Ward is history. And while everything in the mall isn't suffering — Dave will be happy to know that El Chico still dishes up the Tex-Mex to good crowds — the general atmosphere has been one of "So when are they going to put this place out of its misery already?"

Not so fast, Bucky. The buzz was positive today, and while no one is saying for sure until the contracts are signed, the word is that a big-box appliance store, most likely Best Buy, is going to take over the Wards spot. (Circuit City once had a store across the street, but it died quickly, and its space is now occupied by a Goodwill store.) To me it seems like an odd place for a Best Buy, which normally shuns malls, but it's a fair distance from their other stores in the area, and with the local Sight 'N Sound chain having been sold off, this might be the time for Best Buy to make its move.

I go past it every weekday morning, but it's usually an hour or so before sunrise, so I didn't notice until today that the Guest House Inn, an old motel once a fixture of the no-longer-around Classen Circle, has been torn down. I have no idea what's in store for the lot; access from I-44 is not wonderful, and I suspect that antique dealers around this area have reached a saturation point. And somehow I doubt that people wanting to crash after a night at Edna's will crawl two whole blocks to the Courtyard by Marriott.

Coming back from the supermarket, I managed to get behind not one but two purveyors of pure pollution: a first-generation Dodge Intrepid and a going-on-fifteen Mazda 929, both of whom were spewing roiling plumes of noxious white smoke into the air and into the ventilation systems of everyone who wasn't fast enough to switch to Recirculate. I don't want to hear anything more about greenhouse gases and other dubious bugaboos until somebody does something about these easily visible and highly verifiable mobile smog machines.

The Interested-Participant is frustrated by the absence of vital information on political yard signs:

Sometimes there's a reason for this — officially, the election of a Mayor in Oklahoma City is nonpartisan, and judges here tend to be on a retention ballot — but I'm guessing that generally, it's an attempt to get some name recognition before you actually see the ballot and the straight-ticket option (where available).

There is, of course, a solution:

This does seem to work: I have yet to see any yards with split tickets. Perhaps the people who do cross party lines are less inclined to put up yard signs in the first place. On the other hand, I'm tempted to go offer space to some minor GOP candidate to contrast with the Democratic sign I already have.

(Update, 11:10 am: Then there's this.)