The National Education Association has released its annual teacher-salary survey, and once again Oklahoma is near the bottom: 50th, at $35,061. Only South Dakota ranks lower.

These figures do not take into account recent legislative moves to increase teacher pay and benefits, which will not be reflected in the NEA's numbers for at least a year.

The connection between teacher salaries and quality of education is at best somewhat frayed: the District of Columbia, ranked at a lofty #3 by NEA at $57,009, has some major problems in its schools. And Oklahoma's low cost of living, relatively low taxes, and (once fully in place) competitive benefits package tend to offset the low salary numbers.

Still, it is true that many teachers have left the classroom for greener pastures, and retention of experienced teachers is certainly a worthy goal. NEA's focus on salaries is to be expected — it is a labor union, after all — but last I looked, about 50 percent of teachers were paid salaries below the national median, and this isn't going to change no matter how many surveys get published.

In the Netherlands, physician-assisted suicide is legal: a person of sound mind in extreme pain may request a lethal dose of sedatives.

Now the Groningen University Hospital has proposed guidelines for ending the lives of newborns, persons in irreversible coma, and other individuals who cannot make the decision for themselves. Scary enough — and that's before the revelation that they've already begun implementing the procedure on their own.

The Groningen Protocol, estimates the hospital, might apply to as many as ten persons per year; in 2003, Groningen reported the euthanizing of four infants.

Francis W. Porretto is appalled:

Are there no exceptions?

I can bring myself to support doctor-assisted suicide, generally: it is, after all, a choice made by the patient. But where the patient can't make that choice? This is way too Clockwork Orange for me.

Speaking of "choice," the very word lately has been imbued with political implications. What would a "pro-choice" organization think about the Groningen Protocol? Dawn Eden suspects they'd like it just fine.

Ashish's Niti hosts Carnival of the Vanities #115, your weekly one-stop compendium of bloggy goodness.

In Sanskrit, a "niti," says Ashish Hanwadikar, incorporates policy, strategy, and vision — which, if you think about it, is quite a proper mission for a blogger.

Fred Alger Management, a New York-based financial-services operation, has sent a letter to the White House containing a plan which, it says, will cut gasoline consumption in half over the next ten years.

The highlight, if that's the word, of the Alger plan is a $1000 tax on any vehicle that doesn't get 30 mpg. Unlike current Corporate Average Fuel Economy standards, this applies not only to new vehicles, but to vehicles already in use: my 25-mpg sedan and someone else's 12-mpg truck will each be assessed a tax of $1000. And that's for the first year: the tax goes up $500 a year thereafter.

In addition to all this gas we won't be buying, says Alger, we'll get a bump in the GDP from all the new fuel-efficient cars we'll have to buy to avoid the tax.

Something is a trifle askew here, and I think it's Alger's assumptions. In an Alger mid-November market commentary [link requires Adobe Reader], I found this paragraph:

Toyota has hardly been "languishing"; in the past few years they've scrambled past Ford to become the world's second-largest automaker. And the contribution of the Prius to Toyota's profits so far has been negligible: the first couple of model years were sold at a loss to establish the brand, and the price to dealers has not risen substantially since that time — though dealers are happy to add their own markups to the factory sticker, what with that waiting list and all. Further, there is no non-hybrid Prius to compare on price, making that "neighborhood of $4000" rather illusory: Honda and Ford get about $3400 extra for their hybrids, and Ford has to pay some of that money to Toyota, some of whose technology they licensed for the Escape hybrid.

Meanwhile, the Autoextremist wonders:

Certainly "energy independence," as envisioned by Alger, is a Good Thing. But I can't help but wonder if we couldn't get most of the same results with a lot less hassle by simply increasing the gasoline tax by a buck or so.

Dean Robbins, reviewing television for the Oklahoma Gazette, on Tom Brokaw's swan song tonight:

This might have made Quote of the Week, had the Chief Justice been, um, you know, actually dead.

Jeff Brokaw of Notes and Musings has taken issue with my "Drab Four" piece. In a reply to a comment I made, he responds:

I'd argue that "Run For Your Life," the last track on Rubber Soul, is a whole lot of wasted notes, but I have to give JB credit for knowing where the good stuff is (hint: it ain't Sgt. Pepper's).

The Beatles may have been pop music's ultimate syncretists: almost anything they ever heard, they found a way to work into their records. I mean, who else would cover both Buck Owens and Larry Williams — on the same album?* It's probably no surprise that they found themselves with a kitchen-sink approach, and no surprise that they eventually felt compelled to get back to where they once belonged.

And while I remain unconvinced that the Beatles were some sort of avatars of a new age or anything like that, their place in the Pantheon of Pop was secured a long time ago; I'd have let them in on the basis of "I Saw Her Standing There," the very first track on their first British LP (and the B-side of "I Want to Hold Your Hand" in the States), a song that rocks as hard as Chuck Berry — think of it as "Sweet Little Sixteen" one year older — yet which clearly points toward the melodic wonders to come.

* By which is meant, the British version of Help! The American Help! contains neither of these tracks: "Dizzy Miss Lizzie" was on Beatles VI Stateside, and "Act Naturally" was held over until Yesterday and Today.

Baldilocks goes (perhaps not too far) out on a limb:

Dr Rice has always said she wasn't interested in the top job, but would she take #2 if it were offered? Would a [fill in name of GOP Presidential wannabe]/Rice ticket draw somewhere between 11 percent and fifty?

And if it would, does it really matter at all whom the Democrats nominate?

Um, did you look for WMD in northwest Arkansas?

(You just know Wal-Mart has to have something to do with this.)

Well, actually, no, I'm not. But the annual gift catalog from Kambers, the first one I've received since the death of Eleanor Kamber two years ago, features two pages of Hummer™-branded stuff, including a pewter-and-zinc windshield scraper for a mere thirty-five bucks. There's also a CD organizer that fastens to the visor, in case your discs aren't getting enough sun, for $25. All these things, produced under license from General Motors by a New York-based importer, are certainly justifiable as gifts, though I can't help but wonder if they could sell that CD case for $17.95 with a Hyundai label.

Well, I just finished going through the 2004 Weblog Awards, and I am pleased to note that there was at least one blog in each category that I had actually read and could vote for with a clear conscience.

I am somewhat bemused by the fact that only about half a dozen of my choices turned out to be leading their categories.

And I would like to thank everyone who did not nominate me, which is everyone: considering how badly I lost last year, I was grateful not to see my name on the ballot.

Sally Allen, to my delight, gives the new University of Oklahoma alcohol policy the derision it deserves:

Then again, this is the state that gave us "non-intoxicating" 3.2 beer.

I don't think we're ever going to resolve the thinker/linker dichotomy, at least in my lifetime, but I do wish sometimes I could be as resolute as Serenity is here:

My prose occasionally make me weep, but that's another issue entirely.

I have no idea who was first to blog a colonoscopy, but it wasn't James Wolcott, no matter what Gawker may think.

Still, give the Denton Empire credit for knowing the ins and outs of the Blogosphere™:

For remembering that quote, I can forgive Gawker for being slightly, um, behind.

Friends and neighbors and total strangers and whatnot joined in the effort to get my Christmas decorations up today, and a considerable effort it was. (My own input was limited to reorienting a few things, removing a few things that came off as just too overwrought, and debris disposal.)

I would have been happier had this happened next Friday, after the electric meter is read, but what the hell. And Michele, and by extension presumably Lileks as well, will be happy to hear that there are at least four colors of lights involved.

Thanks, guys (and gals, as appropriate).

This past year's Senate Bill 1529, passed by the legislature in March and signed by Governor Henry in April, permits municipal employees of cities with populations of 35,000 or more to unionize. (This would include Oklahoma City, Tulsa, Norman, Lawton, Broken Arrow, Edmond, Midwest City, Enid, Moore, Stillwater, Muskogee, and maybe Bartlesville, which recorded 34,748 at the last Census; it does not cover firefighters and police, who have their own collective-bargaining rules.)

The law took effect on the first of November. The American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees almost immediately announced that they would seek to organize Lawton, Enid, Bartlesville and Moore city employees, and employees of the Oklahoma City Zoo Trust, who are not covered under the agreement between Oklahoma City and AFSCME Local 2406.

Since then, Enid has filed suit to block the implementation of the law, arguing that it's unconstitutional because of that population standard; Lawton City Council has authorized a suit; Bartlesville, on that population cusp, would like to be excluded; and the Zoo Trust has won a restraining order against AFSCME until such time as the District Court decides whether its employees meet the definition of "municipal employees" in the new law.

The new House will be under Republican control, and Marian Cooksey (R-Edmond), in what seems to be her first official action, has introduced House Bill 1002, which would repeal the measure outright.

Bank Leumi, the leading bank in Israel, is working with Visa and MasterCard to produce a credit card that will not function on the Sabbath, for use six days a week by Jews who strictly observe the day of rest.

There is no indication whether Bank Leumi's US branch, which already offers a Visa card, will make the new card available to its Orthodox customers.

(Via Fark)

Spoons goes to the MRI, and I get the impression he'd rather not do it again.

I know I wouldn't.

The other day, I left this bit of small-scale snarkage at Andrea Harris' place:

Motivated by something other than that sentence — by this, in fact — Ms Harris has now expanded greatly on the premise therein:

A deity in its own right, even. With its own consequences:

And this is why, she says, that television spot for the United Church of Christ is not likely to produce any worthwhile results:

I reread John 8, in which Christ meets the woman charged with adultery, for context, and the scribes and Pharisees were saying: "Now Moses in the law commanded us that such should be stoned." I leave for the theologians the question of whether the forgiveness of this particular sin in this particular instant constitutes the invalidation of the whole of Mosaic law, but it seems pretty clear to me that the woman would never have been forgiven had Christ determined that she would go forth and do it all over again.

Now I don't buy the argument of various TV networks that the UCC spot is "too controversial"; it was run here as a test earlier this year and barely raised eyebrows. Nor do I believe that because almost everyone has had more sex than me, I have some claim to the moral high ground.

But one thing bugs me. The decision in Lawrence v. Texas effectively invalidated the nation's laws against "sodomy," and good riddance, say I. But while the Supreme Court has spoken, I missed any similar statement from the Supreme Being. Maybe I'm just out of the loop.

The nascent Asian District is getting a bank at 2523 Classen, across the street from, and slightly north of, the fabled Milk Bottle. It's a branch of Edmond-based First Commercial Bank, which recently expanded into Oklahoma City with the acquisition of Rockwell Bank.

In other bank news, Americrest Bank, previously known as Guaranty Bank, is rebranding itself again, this time as Coppermark Bank. The "Americrest" name was coined when Guaranty planned to move into the Dallas-Fort Worth market, where a Guaranty Bank already existed; however, they ran afoul of trademark issues, and had to come up with yet another name. The name change was announced in November, but permanent signage is just now going up.

The Happy Homemaker reports on the impending construction of a Wal-Mart Neighborhood Market in her neck of the woods, near NW 23rd and Pennsylvania. Typically for Wal-Mart, they're not filling the extant vacant space in Penn Crossing; I recall that when they took over an empty Homeland store in The Village, they razed the building and rebuilt. Still, the arrival was arguably good for Casady Square across the street, and The Village needed the sales-tax revenue, especially with Albertson's moving across Britton Road into Oklahoma City territory. Those who hate all things Wal-Mart will undoubtedly head for the Buy 4 Less across Penn, or drive elsewhere, but I've learned not to bet against Sam Walton's retail machine.

And there are still some small signs of life at Bradford Commons, apartments located south of the Oklahoma Health Center between NE 7th and NE 8th. The 247-unit complex was sold in 2001 for a startling $3.5 million dollars to 2012 LLC. This year, TV news has been coming up with regular stories about how the place has gone to hell: the water was supposed to have been turned off around Thanksgiving, and all the tenants are presumably going to have to be gone by the end of the month, when the complex shuts down. Rumors that the Commons would be sold have persisted, and KGOU radio reported this week that the University of Oklahoma, one rumored buyer, isn't interested. I haven't heard that the Commons are going to be Cabrini-Greened out of existence, but at this point, I wouldn't be surprised to see bulldozers heading down 8th Street.

I normally don't toot the horn much for my Web host: while DreamHost has been good to me over the past three years, they're a little pricier than some, and a few of the big Movable Type-based blogs had difficulties with them some years back and moved elsewhere.

Their monthly newsletter, however, contained this remarkable statement:

Translation: They'd like more blogs, but don't want the additional overhead of MT and its endless rebuilds.

(Aside: If you actually do sign up for one of these things, send me a click through the DH logo in the nav column, or drop my URL to the staff. I could use the kickback referral reward.)

Ann Althouse's property-tax bill for 2004 was $11,926.89.

<sound of jaw striking parquet floor>

To run up a tax bill of that size in my neighborhood, she'd have to have a house worth $985,816.

She says elsewhere that the tax on the mythical average house in Madison, Wisconsin, worth $205,359, is $4,458.

This suggests a rate of 21.71 per thousand, which implies that her house is valued at about $549,400.

For comparison purposes, a home valued at $549,400 in my particular taxing district would be taxed $6,598. Not that there are any such; City-Data.com reports that as of 2000, there were only 11 homes in this entire ZIP code worth as much as half a million bucks, and Realtor.com says that the average home around here sells for a modest $93,541, which I calculate would run up taxes of $1031.

Fritz Schranck, living in the sacred land of Delaware, is of course paying quite a bit less.

Since people are starting to post their browser distributions, sometimes to make a political point, sometimes to refute one, and since I don't have my SiteMeter results open to the public — before you ask, it has something to do with the fact that I actually pay for the darn thing — I'm posting my current market-share data here.

• 74.1 percent: Microsoft Internet Explorer
  
• 17.5 percent: Mozilla Firefox and related browsers
  
•   3.9 percent: Safari
  
•   3.3 percent: Netscape
  
•   1.1 percent: Opera
  
•   0.1 percent: WebTV
  

Possible skew factors: I browse with Firefox at home, but with IE 6 at work. SM seems to break out Netscape separately from other Gecko-based browsers, but Camino, for one, seems to be lumped in with the Mozillas (Mozillae?).

From the Department of Half a Loaf:

Per The Washington Post.

Predicted here:

Mr Efford, so far, still has his job, thus "half a loaf."

More bothersome, though, is this (same WaPo article):

Apparently nobody on Committee staff gives the farging stuff more than a perfunctory once-over after it's written.

(Via Cam Edwards' sidekick Farrah. Oh, and this is a "snert".)

"From time to time," says a proposed disclaimer for material distributed through Portland, Oregon schools on behalf of groups not associated with the district, "you may receive materials from a group that holds values that may offend some of our families."

Like, for instance, the Boy Scouts of America.

Atheist and gay parents had fought the placing of Scout materials in Portland schools, and said that while the disclaimer was an improvement, the Scout booklets are still handed out by teachers, which, according to the AP story, "lends credibility to the group's message."

The Mandatory Serenity Amendment — "The right of the peoples of the United States to be free from any ideas or materials or products, which they may find offensive, shall not be infringed" — has so far been ratified by 0 states.

(Via Tongue Tied.)

Can't trust that day, as I have next to nothing to say. In the interim, here's some of the stuff you should have read already:

• If you've ever wanted to see Condi Rice or Ann Coulter on a calendar, now's your chance.

• I just like the sound of this: Drumthwacket.

• Donna has a Bacon number. (Update: It's 3.)

• Unpaid bloggers of the world, unite!

• Is anybody really going to relocate from New York to Topeka because of economic freedom considerations?

• Apparently there is good botulinum toxin, and there is bad botulinum toxin.

• It's 10 am. Do you know where your school bus is?
  

Back later.

Scenario: Senator Clinton runs for re-election in 2006, knowing full well she's going to run for President in 2008. What's wrong with this picture?

Nothing, says David Limbaugh:

I think Mr Limbaugh is exaggerating a bit. New York has about eleven million voters; .00000000000001 percent of that number would get you down to the level of mitochondria, unless he's counting Michael Moore. But I agree with his larger point: it doesn't make any meaningful difference to voters whether Mrs Clinton is still in the Senate or not when (as distinguished from if) she mounts her Presidential bid.

The National Bureau of Economic Research has conducted a study to answer the question: if racial preferences were abolished, would highly-qualified minority students be less willing to apply to top-rung schools?

And why would they be? Is it possible that not having a substantial minority population at these schools might discourage minority applicants?

The NBER study suggests otherwise:

I infer from this that the best students, minority or otherwise, pay little attention to racial preferences. But look farther down the scale:

Or, as John Rosenberg explains:

How, then, to increase minority enrollment? La Shawn Barber, who's been there, has a four-point plan:

Well, at least she won't have Kweisi Mfume to kick around anymore.

Oklahoma became a state in 1907, and almost immediately became a segregated state: Senate Bill One was the first of many Jim Crow laws which took entirely too long to repeal.

One of the tactics used to undermine Jim Crow was the sit-in, and one of the first places it was used effectively was Katz Drug Store in downtown Oklahoma City. It was 1958, and teacher Clara Luper brought her students into Katz' soda fountain for soft drinks: when said drinks were not forthcoming, Luper and the kids resolved to stay put. They got their drinks, but the aftermath wasn't pretty, and it took five or six years before every lunch counter in town, every restaurant, got the message.

The Freedom Center on Oklahoma City's Eastern Avenue, now Martin Luther King Avenue, will be presenting a play written by Luper: The Dred Scott Story, about the slave whose suit for freedom was eventually denied by the US Supreme Court.

I hadn't thought about this — okay, I hadn't thought about this much — but Andrea Harris has:

Having once been married to someone who outearned me — which doesn't take much, alas — I must concede that there's something to this. So does Chi-Lite Eugene Record:

Did this phenomenon play any role in the Presidential election? The Twisted Spinster thinks so:

It is an unfortunate fact of my life that anyone who catches my eye, quite apart from the usual array of obstacles, will inevitably prove to be way out of my league. So I strive to be as self-sufficient as I can, knowing that neediness, at least in my case, always seems to breed resentment.

Once France was accepted as a member of the Axis of Weasels and otherwise-rational people started asking for "Freedom Fries", it was perhaps inevitable that the Campbell Soup Company would put the 117-year-old "Franco-American" brand name out of its misery.

Then again, I always preferred Chef Boy-Ar-Dee (who was an Italian, anyway).

(Via Weetabix.)

The editors of Discover, a science mag published by a Disney subsidiary, replied to a letter from an intelligent-design advocate (January '05) with this comparison:

Obviously, this doesn't settle anything. My own thinking here is that it would be a fairer comparison were there any languages as complex as DNA strands: there are, admittedly, only four different building blocks, but the structures are astoundingly convoluted.

Then again, my own thinking along these lines has always been something like "Evolution is God's standard upgrade path," a position that appeals neither to hard-core Darwinists nor to young-earth partisans. I'd like to hear some rational (or at least justifiable) arguments either way.

Vik Rubenfeld's The Big Picture is the host for Carnival of the Vanities #116, your weekly guide to Bloggy Goodness in a single handy page. As always, it's not to be missed.

Donna is facing a dilemma, and this is the way she approaches a solution:

I'm inclined to think that with role models like these, she'll come out of this just fine.

In case you thought that sport-utility vehicles were taking over the world, be advised that they're taking a break: the General Motors Oklahoma City Assembly facility, which produces seven-passenger Chevrolet TrailBlazers and its GMC and Isuzu brethren, will temporarily cut about 250 to 300 jobs next month in an effort to balance production and inventory.

The GMC Envoy XUV, produced only in Oklahoma City, is not selling well despite its sliding roof over the cargo area, a feature last seen in mid-1960s Studebaker wagons.

This is perhaps an indication that Detroit really didn't expect that truck sales might drop in the wake of two-dollar-plus gas. I'm not persuaded that the SUV boom is over, but I'm fairly sure that it's past its peak.

Some of what I wrote on 8 December 2000:

Of course, now it's down to two remaining rusty old men, and link rot has demanded some shuffling, but otherwise, I could have written that today. And I suspect I'll probably write it again around 2010. (You may say I'm a slacker, but I'm not the only one.)

You think Christmas is overwrought? Let Eric Akawie tell you what's happened to Chanukah:

On the upside, Purim has got to be more fun than Lent.

Four hundred miles down I-35 is the city of Austin, the capital of Texas, a place where I have lots of roots, and a place that prides itself on its weirdness. Nothing wrong with that, say I, but I've been back a few times since my days at The University (yes, that one), and while there are aspects of it I dearly love, it never struck me as being, well, all that weird.

J. M. Branum, who's lived both here and there, makes a case that Oklahoma City might be weirder than Austin:

And lots more reasons. I don't think that Oklahoma City is destined to be, well, the "next Austin," but I don't lie awake at night wondering what I'm missing by living here either.

"You don't need a Weatherman," said Zimmerman, "to know which way the wind blows."

Which I suppose is true: no one is marketing, for instance, a wall-mounted climate-observation apparatus with the images of Bernadine Dohrn and Mark Rudd on the dial faces.

On the other hand, it's no particular trick to pick up a Ché Guevara watch.

The ramp from I-44 eastbound to I-35 southbound is a fairly sharp 90-degree curve, followed by one of Oklahoma's infamous too-short-by-half merging lanes, and since it's all elevated — but not at the same height, which means one heck of a blind spot — the payback for not executing the merge properly is serious.

I've tackled this ramp maybe three hundred times, and under favorable conditions (which is to say "when it's dry") it's no particular trick, at least in my car, to maintain 60-mph speed from 44 all the way around the swoop and merge seamlessly into the southbound 35 traffic flow. Unfortunately, two members of the Anti-Destination League, puttering along at 48 mph or so, picked this moment to be occupying the space I'd normally be assuming post-merge. And it wasn't like their progress, if that's the word, was being thwarted by some rolling speed bump up ahead; there was at least a 1500-foot gap in front of them.

The solution was simple enough — downshift to second, spin up to 6200 rpm, and zoom-zoom into the gap — but I have to admit that this is not my favorite maneuver during pre-dawn darkness.

The Instalanche™ perhaps isn't what it used to be. For a while, I had the smallest on record; since then, BoiFromTroy has lowered the bar.

Indeed, the combination of both those events wouldn't equal half the traffic I got from an offhand Baldilocks item.

Lesson learned: never underestimate the power of a smart woman with a sense of humor. (I already knew how to suck up.)

In the town of Enterprise, Alabama, there is a monument to the boll weevil, a creature generally negatively viewed and usually characterized as destructive, which forced farmers in the Heart of Dixie to abandon their single-minded devotion to King Cotton, thereby ensuring their future.

And you know, what worked in the South might work just as well on the east side of New York City:

No, really:

I wish I'd thought of that.

This is Finance Girl.

I dare not hope that some day she'll balance my sheets, but oh, the interest she'll accrue.

If you'd like to see just what sort of weirdness went on here during the Decorating Phase a week ago, it was something like this.

Incidentally, "Snowman" has been moved to a more frontal location.

Daniel Fears, convicted of shooting up Sallisaw in October 2002, was sentenced today to life without parole. During the rampage, apparently prompted by a complaint about Fears' driving, two townspeople were killed and eight others wounded. As predicted here, counsel for the defense had attempted to show that Mr Fears was suffering from a mental disorder.

Previous coverage:
Berserk? We got that
Sallisaw shooting update
Fears on trial
Fears on trial (part two)
Delayed follow-ups

The International House of Pancakes is coming to Bricktown, and The Downtown Guy considers the ramifications thereof:

If you think of Bass Pro as the easternmost outpost of Bricktown, the Central Plaza Inn is a mile and a half farther away. Still, this is a logical progression, with Martin Luther King Avenue the probable limit of expansion; farther south on Eastern will be the Native American Cultural Center and Museum, which likely will define the eastern boundary of the New Downtown.

Matt Deatherage reflects on the death of Dr. Frederick Fennell:

To find someone who's done as much for the wind ensemble, you'd probably have to go all the way back to John Philip Sousa.

A letter from TXU Energy Australia, addressed to "Paranoid Fool" in Melbourne, Victoria, was delivered to photographer Albert Comper, who took exception to the letter's "Dear Paranoid" salutation.

TXU, of course, has no idea how this happened, although the incident does recall one of our Stateside legends:

Well, it could have happened. Of course, in the days of Pullman cars, there weren't advocacy groups for persons with mental disorders to point out how "incredibly offensive" the TXU letter was.

(Via Fark)

How about a nice cup of Shut the Fox Up?

The FOXBlocker is a line filter that attaches to your analog-cable line (no version for digital cable yet) and filters out the Fox News Channel. It's not channel-specific — it works on channels 2 through 62 — which suggests to me that it looks for Fox identifying information on line 21 of the NTSC signal, where closed captions and XDS reside.

Me, I'm waiting for a TiVo add-on that refuses to record anything mentioning Paris Hilton.

(Via Screenhead)

(Update, 4:20 pm: Submitted to Beltway Traffic Jam.)

Scene: One hundred years from now, and....

Glory, or alternate form of acclaim where appropriate, to the deity or deities of your choice, or none at all if so specified, in the highest, or to a comparable level conforming to official specifications, and on earth peace, or similar absence of conflict, and good will, as defined in paragraph 3, section C, "Federal Will Regulations," to men, women, children, and persons of indeterminate or ambiguous gender.

Some people actually fall for this:

A chap from San Antonio named Alan Louis Chavis apparently got enough "pure profit," even at the discount price of $25, to operate two customer-response centers, which he was careful to locate in faraway Oklahoma. It didn't save him; in September, prosecutors in Oklahoma put him on trial for mail fraud, and yesterday Chavis was sentenced to 19 years and three months and ordered to forfeit $250,000.

One down, however many thousands to go.

Alan Sullivan looks at today's post-election-traumatized Democratic Party, and experiences a sense of déjà vu:

So who's going to salvage what's left of this bunch?

Or, as Greg Hlatky so tersely put it:

Not to mention the Know-Nothings.

For no particularly good reason today, I found myself traipsing around Newcastle, a McClain County town just down I-44/US 62 from southwest Oklahoma City, which, although it certainly doesn't look like it now, might be the next big Suburban Destination. At least some of the pieces are in place: it's a local call from anywhere in the city, it's relatively easy to get to, and both southwest Oklahoma City and west Norman, on the opposite side of the Canadian River, are experiencing something of a boom. What's more, perhaps in anticipation of their coming status, the city fathers have annexed basically everything in the county north of Highway 9 and west of I-35 that wasn't already incorporated into, or surrounded by, the city of Blanchard: they have almost 50 square miles to work with. Wal-Mart has put in a Supercenter on NW 32nd Street (SW 179th Street/Indian Hills Road if Oklahoma City or Norman extended this far), and a couple of housing developments are underway. And since the north Newcastle exit from I-44 (US 62/277, which is Main Street) is the last free exit before the road turns into the H. E. Bailey Turnpike — but you can see the pattern here. The population is a modest 6,000 or so right now; I wouldn't be surprised if it hit 20,000 by 2020.

Meanwhile, things are still happening in the middle of town. Oklahoma City's Neighborhood Services department is putting in half a dozen new houses along NE 5th Terrace, between the Oklahoma Health Center and Washington Park, and I took a look this afternoon. They're quite nice, and the neighborhood itself I would characterize as "on the upswing": some of the older homes in the area are a bit on the ramshackle side, but they haven't been allowed to become seriously dilapidated, and the newer buildings are kept up well. For a "brownfield" — an area whose proximity to industrial use may have resulted in ground or groundwater contamination — it looks pretty good. One visual disappointment in the area is the boarded-up Page Woodson School, which served as the "Negro high school" in the early days of Jim Crow. However, the majestic old 1910 building may be getting a new lease on life: Oklahoma City Northeast Inc., with some serious backing from the local community, wants to reopen the school as an African-American cultural center, and has asked the city to include it in their project list for the local Empowerment Zone.

Marquee on a westside church: WHAT DID NOAH DO WITH THE WOODPECKERS? Your guess is as good as mine, maybe better.

And apparently Bricktown, as a trademark, is far more extensible than previously imagined; there's an inn called "Bricktown Guest Suites" going in on SE Grand Blvd. at I-35, a good four miles from the downtown district whose name it borrows.

It was probably too much to expect that Mitchell William Miller would have been a rock and roll fan. For one thing, he was born in 1911; for another, he studied the oboe at Eastman, inspired by Pablo Casals' cello work, long, fluid melodic lines that melted into the air. By 1936 he was playing with the CBS Symphony Orchestra; he left in 1948 to take an A&R job at Chicago's Mercury Records under VP John Hammond.

In 1950, former classmate Goddard Lieberson lured Mitch Miller back to CBS, this time to run A&R at Columbia Records; Miller brought one of his Mercury stars, Frankie Laine, with him. At Columbia, Miller's tenure was a mixture of brilliance and banality. An example of the former: the invention of the Greatest Hits album. Johnny's Greatest Hits, a compilation of Johnny Mathis singles, entered the Billboard album charts in 1958. It was still there in nineteen sixty-eight. An example of the latter: Frank Sinatra's "duet" with Dagmar, "Mama Will Bark," which was thrown on the B-side of a real Sinatra single, "I'm a Fool to Want You," but still garnered enough airplay to make #21 on the charts.

That rock and roll stuff never did impress Mitch Miller much; "The reason kids like rock and roll," he said, "is that their parents don't." He did have more than a passing familiarity with country music, though, and when Sam Phillips put Elvis Presley's Sun contract on the market, Miller thought Elvis had enough potential to justify putting in a bid. And in one of the weirder ironies of pre-Beatles pop, one of Mitch Miller's biggest stars at Columbia was, yes, Mitch Miller, who put nineteen singles on the Hot 100, including one Number One ("The Yellow Rose of Texas," 1955). In 1960, the TV variety series "Ford Startime" gave him a one-shot special, titled "Sing Along with Mitch"; it became a series on NBC and ran for four years.

In the 80s and 90s, Miller returned to classical music, conducting the London Symphony on record, including a highly-regarded Gershwin collection — no surprise, really, since Miller had played with George Gershwin on his 1934 American tour.

But when I think of Mitch Miller, being the crass pop-culture sub-maven I am, I'll probably remember his 1958 hit (it scraped the bottom of the Top 20) waxing of the Colonel Bogey March, the whistled tune that appeared in the film of Pierre Boulle's novel The Bridge on the River Kwai, and which, contrary to popular belief, did not originally accuse Hitler of monorchidism.

Naomi Brown of Overbrook sent this to The Oklahoman; it will appear in their letters column ("Your Views") tomorrow.

On the other hand, it's possible to comprehend, say, the Electoral College; nobody understands the BCS.

Spoons, whose birthday is the 15th of December, will be spending that birthday getting a CT myelogram.

Not that I'll get much of a chance to celebrate Spoons, either; that's the day I get the debris scraped out of my knee joint.

From the descriptions proffered, he's going to have the worst of this deal, so if you're in Pray For The Lost Souls mode, cut him in for the majority of the grace, wouldja please?

The United Church of Christ has filed a petition with the FCC against two Miami-area television stations, WFOR-TV and WTVJ-TV, respectively CBS and NBC owned-and-operated stations, asserting that there is reason to question whether the stations' parent companies, Viacom (for WFOR) and General Electric (for WTVJ), were operating, in the FCC's catchphrase, "in the public interest." The petition stems from the networks' refusal to run the UCC's recent ad.

Andrea Harris is not impressed:

Then again, this is standard operating procedure for the UCC, which was formed through the merger of two smaller denominations in 1957; by 1964, they'd already set up an Office of Communication, and challenged the license of WLBT (Jackson, Mississippi) on the basis that it was racist. The FCC held that the church had no legal standing to challenge a broadcast license; the church took them to court, and the Supreme Court eventually overruled the FCC: "The broadcast industry," wrote Chief Justice Warren Burger, "does not seem to have grasped the simple fact that a broadcast license is a public trust subject to termination for breach of duty."

Of course, the Supremes' ruling in the WLBT affair made it possible for everyone up to and including Brent Bozell's boob-counters to get into the act. And in the 1960s, Jackson had a total of two television stations. Today, with half a dozen, plus cable and the Internet, it's difficult to argue with a straight face that any media operation is actually affecting the course of public discourse, let alone dominating it. The FCC answers to Congress, not to the Executive, so the President won't be taking a broom to the place any time soon; too bad, because I'd love to see a Commission with the temerity to laugh at both the UCC's "They should be forced to take our ads" stance and Fox's upcoming reality series "America's Scariest Brazilian Waxes."

(Update, 13 December, 3:45 pm: Fixed one set of call letters — see comments.)

Tuesday's election in Oklahoma City will feature the measure to increase the hotel/motel room tax from 2 percent to 5.5 percent — not including the sales tax, which they conveniently forgot to mention in their promotional materials.

But that's not the only ballot issue you may see in the city. If you live in the Midwest City/Del City school district, whose boundaries [link requires Adobe Reader] include some parts of eastern Oklahoma City, you'll also be voting on a ten-year bond issue for Rose State College, which would raise $7.65 million for a facility for Tinker AFB civilians attending specialized classes.

The really interesting ballot measure in the area, though, is outside the city. In Choctaw, Mayor Don Griffin is facing a recall, and the story reads like a bad television drama. Two challengers, Robert Mabra and Randy Ross, will be seeking to unseat Griffin.

Since by nature I tend to be squarer than SpongeBob's pants, any revelation here that I am occasionally subject to the natural (and, well, okay, unnatural) urges that afflict us from time to time tends to get horrified emails, or worse, disgusted comments.

Still, some things arouse my, um, curiosity. For instance, the one question everyone seems to want to know about actress Lindsay Lohan is whether whether she's had the front line of her balcony resculpted. * I don't really want to know, but I'd love to catch a few outtakes from the photo session for the cover of Entertainment Weekly #797, which features Lindsay in nothing but tights yet shows scarcely any flesh. (Score one for the trompe l'oeil guys.)

Speaking of magazine pieces, whose idea was it to pose Dakota Fanning, not yet ten fercrissake, in the November Movieline's Hollywood Life with her hair tossed back and her legs crossed, like some sort of HO-scale Gwyneth Paltrow?

And oh, just because it sounds so utterly bizarre: imagine a porn film, preferably a short one, in which all the participants have Tourette's syndrome. **

* Link probably not safe for work.

** Link definitely not safe for work.

The Oklahoman reports this morning that despite low mortgage-interest rates, 31 percent of black and Hispanic customers failed to qualify for conventional home loans during 2003, versus 23 percent of American Indians, 15 percent of whites and 12 percent of Asians.

This does not indicate any pattern of discrimination among lenders: the practice of "redlining" — refusing to make loans in presumably-undesirable areas — is essentially extinct. It does, however, indicate that black and Latino borrowers tend to have poorer credit scores. (Not that mine is all that wonderful.)

While no one has made a case that the scores themselves are discriminatory, it's reasonable, I think, to assume that not everyone understands the scores, and the factors that contribute to them, equally well. The Oklahoma Homebuyer Education Association, a joint venture of lenders and community groups, is working to upgrade people's knowledge of what it takes to qualify for a mortgage.

Lenders, to their credit, have been coming up with alternative mortgage programs to reach more buyers. (Disclosure: I took advantage of one such program myself, a pilot program by a major lender, directed at people with okay credit scores but iffy prospects for substantial down payments.) The upside, of course, is more homeowners, which means more people with tangible assets, and which, because people have more of a stake in their community, ultimately means better neighborhoods. This may be somewhat easier in Oklahoma, with its relatively low-priced housing stock, but the principles apply everywhere.

Michael Bates applauds the idea of a new central library in Tulsa, but he's not all that happy with the location:

I don't believe anyone ever considered building the new downtown Oklahoma City library anywhere other than, well, downtown. While motor-vehicle access is a bit cumbersome, the facility, despite a certain similarity to buildings used by the United Federation of Planets, fits nicely into the city's notion of an Arts District along the western edge of downtown: Hudson Avenue southbound will also take you to the Oklahoma City Museum of Art (at Couch Drive) and StageCenter (at Sheridan Avenue), and the spring Festival of the Arts is conducted largely in the middle of Hudson.

Tulsa's growth over the years has been largely to the south and east, so downtown Tulsa is actually rather far removed from the geographical center of the city. Apparently it's been suggested that a Central Library be more, um, central. I don't think so, and neither does Mr Bates:

Our big worry down here right now is finding places for the two new branch libraries. (We have the funding: the bond issue for them, and for upgrades at three existing branches, passed in 2000.) Right now, residents of far northwest Oklahoma City have to go at least as far as The Village (Pennsylvania north of Britton Road) or Warr Acres (63rd and MacArthur) branches, or to Edmond, and things aren't much better in the southwest quadrant. That new southwest library will be in Cleveland County and will be operated by the Pioneer Library System out of Norman; the 50,000 or so Oklahoma City residents in Cleveland County can get cards at both Pioneer and Metro [Oklahoma County] systems.

The French are apparently upset that the Carl's Jr. fast-food chain would mock their nation on the basis of three military defeats.

Then again, it was only a thirty-second spot.

Top Ten possible new names for the city of Lawton:

  10.  Arridextra
    9.  Spentshell
    8.  Cache Heights
    7.  Offlimits
    6.  Faxon Farms
    5.  Sillville
    4.  Cooler Than Altus
    3.  Wichita Springs
    2.  Dustbunny
    1.  Lawlesston

(Tip of the sombrero to Mike H.)

9.1.1.

(Via Ryne McClaren.)

Oklahoma's seven Presidential electors officially cast their ballots for George W. Bush today, mostly because they believed in the man, and perhaps partly because they'd be fined a thousand bucks if they didn't.

Minnesota electors, under no such strictures, cast nine of the state's 10 votes for John Kerry, the tenth unaccountably going to John Edwards, an action which no doubt will frost Timothy Noah no end.

Sunset has started to advance again, after retreating back to 5:17 pm, but nights are still just about as long as they can be. Fortunately, last night was about as nice a period of winter darkness as you can find in Oklahoma: the air was cold but dry, clouds had been banished from the premises, and the lights of Bricktown seemed brighter than usual, even beyond the usual holiday decor.

Then came the morning, and the revelation that the Mother of All Potholes (well, I don't know if it's truly the Mother, but I recall addressing it in some related fashion) has now reached across almost an entire lane of traffic. And since it was filled with water yesterday afternoon, I can't think of any reason why I should have been surprised that this morning (low 24) it was full of ice, but I was definitely grateful not to be facing any oncoming traffic during the inevitable Swerve Mode.

Generally, I don't normally travel that direction in the morning, but I figured I'd go vote. I arrived at 7:09, and the poll workers were just getting things opened up. Given the amount of turnout one can reasonably expect for an election this minor, they probably needn't have rushed.

Dave Pell of Davenetics notes that insurance giant Geico is suing Google for trademark infringement; the reptilian corporation asserts that Google, by selling Sponsored Links to Geico's competitors, which will come up when you run a Google search for Geico, is violating Geico's trademark rights.

I found this out because Dave bought a Sponsored Link from Google, which will come up when you run a Google search for Geico.

File this under "Geez, I wish I'd thought of that."

(Update, 15 December, 8 pm: Google prevails.)

If you'd like to own Bill and Hillary Clinton's house in Fayetteville, Arkansas, you'll have to outbid Mayor Dan Coody; he wants the University of Arkansas, where both B&H were on the law-school faculty in the 70s, to acquire the house and operate it as a tourist site.

Owners James and Janet Greeson are asking around $285,000 for the one-bedroom, one-bath house at 930 South California Boulevard. A recent appraisal suggested a price of $199,000, which does not include $75,000 in recommended improvements; I don't know whether the kitchen, which had been done up in the sort of Seventies orange and yellow that would make James Lileks cringe, has been restored to sanity.

If that price seems high to you, be advised the house is probably bigger than you think: 1790 square feet, which is more than half again as large as my palatial three-bedroom digs.

(Via Rita, who sees the house as a potential fuel source.)

One of the preparations for tomorrow's knee surgery is to defuzz the surrounding area, and so, razor in hand and center of gravity askew, I went to work.

Fifteen minutes and not so much blood later, I figure I'm done, and I figure I don't want to do this ever again unless I'm entered in some sort of contest. (Which, now that I think about it, was the reason I did it the last time.)

Women, I presume, have this down to a science, maybe even an art form.

(And this will be the last entry until I'm off the table and feigning being functional again.)

Whatever else one may think of the American health-care system, when it works, it works efficiently. I got to the ambulatory facility a tick or two before seven-thirty, and by ten they were wheeling me to the curb. (Try that in the European Union.)

Of course, the offending joint is wrapped to Egyptian-sarcophagus standards, and it's carrying a portable glacier to boot, but this is just temporary, and I've laid in an additional stock of Rush Limbaugh's favorite painkiller, just in case.

I expect maybe a week of downtime. In the meantime, there are lots of places on the blogroll to fulfill your daily requirement of free ice cream. And anyway, old bloggers never die; as Spoons says, they just stop getting linked.

And thanks to Steffanie of the ELF Liberation Front for performing the tedious tasks this morning that, due to really bad pain followed by really good anesthesia, I was unable to undertake on my own.

Since I'm not exactly gathering my own news, I suppose I can play Manual Aggregator (not available for GameCube®) for a little while. Here's some of what's going on:

• Dawn in Detroit scored some V-rated tires, which will be helpful for getting out of Detroit.

• Lachlan ponders a question mostly unasked, but perhaps inevitable, in the realm of same-sex marriage: "What in the hell do we do about our last names?"

• McGehee breaks hundreds of links with a single gesture.

• A British actor carries £1 million in wang insurance.

• Lack of sleep has driven Susanna to wearing snowman flannel pajamas.

• Tulsans voted down a new Central Library, which won't hurt Michael Bates' feelings at all.

• Evidently Fran Porretto remembers George Washington's axe.

• These days, Google is downright soulful.
  

This ought to hold you for a couple of minutes, anyway.

There are two Pryhills, so far as I can tell, but Ace is the one who got stuck with the heavy lifting.

Still, thanks to them both for Carnival of the Vanities #117, the best bloggage of the week in handy, easily-digestible form, and since it's starting to look a lot like Christmas, this week's Carnival is at the mall.

Hey, it's not like you have to look for a parking space, fercryingoutloud. Go ye and read.

The city of Indianapolis says that a new stadium to replace the aging RCA Dome would add $30 million a year to the local economy, over and above the $75 million in revenue generated by the presence of an NFL team.

Which, out of a mere eight home games, sounds awfully impressive. And taking a leaf from the Oklahoma City playbook, Indy has bundled the stadium plan with an upgrade to the Indiana Convention Center, the total price to be some $700 million.

Still: seven hundred million American dollars? The entire set of MAPS projects here in the Okay City, including a convention-center upgrade, cost maybe half that. This new stadium must be absolutely incredible.

And even if it is, what's to stop the Irsay family from sneaking the Colts out of Indianapolis in the dead of night? It's not like such a thing has never happened before. I wish Indy well, but the numbers here don't seem to add up.

(Via Punch the Bag.)

My appreciation for things I can't do very well seems to have gone up now that I can't do them at all. The temporary fixed-knee-angle business has its uses, and I understand them, but movement, for the moment, seems more theoretical than actual. I did have the prescience to pick up a cane this fall, and it seems to help with the launch. (The actual cane is fussily high-tech, with a black metallic finish, a height-adjustment knob, and four points of contact with the floor, but this seems to be one of those situations where a shepherd's crook wouldn't have been quite so efficient.)

More annoying, in fact, is the sponge-baths-only edict for the next couple of days, inasmuch as the early-morning shower is one of the essential ingredients for enabling me to create the illusion that I'm awake.

Positive developments: I haven't had to dip into the stash of industrial-strength painkillers yet — a couple of store-knockoff Excedrin PMs got me to sleep decently enough — and so far, the only places that itch are within reach.

I don't normally pay much attention to the Tulsa World; they've never been known for having a surplus of clues anyway, and most of their really absurd statements end up dissected on BatesLine.

This morning's editorial page [link requires Adobe Reader], however, is silly enough to merit some pokes from my end of the turnpike. On the failure of a measure to issue bonds for the improvement of the Tulsa County library system, the World came up with this meaningless comparison:

What, was the library system shutting down? Of course not. It's not even suffering. What was turned down was a bond issue to finance some improvements, the sort of thing they haven't seen in Tulsa since, oh, 1998 or so. Michael Bates explains:

(In case you're curious, the library system accounts for 5.32 mills of the Tulsa County tax rate; it's 5.20 in Oklahoma County.)

But those crapheads in Oklahoma City — why, they've taxed themselves a whole lot more than that, says the World. Well, yes, we did. Mere taxation, though, didn't produce the growth we're enjoying. We put $360 million into MAPS, but the private sector has forked over more than a billion. The $700 million for MAPS for Kids won't produce that kind of private investment, but bringing city schools up to the quality level expected (if not always achieved) in suburban schools will help keep the city growing at nearly the same rate as the 'burbs, while other central cities stagnate or contract as families with children flee. (Yeah, I know: vouchers. We'll get to them some other time.)

In other words, taxation is just a means to an end, not an end in itself. The World doesn't seem to grasp that idea:

This is eerily reminiscent of the post-election Democratic mantra "We didn't get our message out." Does it not occur to the World, or for that matter to the Democratic establishment, that the problem wasn't the distribution of the message but the message itself?

Just for icing on the cake, here's a bit from the second editorial on the page, concerning the distribution of federal highway funds:

Um, the Crosstown Expressway is Interstate 40. And lions aren't generally inclined to share.

Air America Radio is up to 40 affiliates now. The liberal network has signed Clear Channel's WSCC, a 5-kw daytimer (there is nighttime authorization, but at a meager 103 watts) in Charleston, South Carolina at 730 kHz. The calls will be switched to WSSP, and the station's tag line is "Talk Radio for the Rest of Charleston."

WSCC's previous format, featuring Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh, continues on WSCC-FM (94.3 MHz), which had been simulcasting the AM programs following the demise of its R&B/hip-hop format this summer. I, of course, find it interesting that Clear Channel owns both a "liberal" and a "conservative" station in the same market. The news/talk competition is Citadel's WTMA.

If the next question is "Will there ever be an Air America station here?" the answer is a definite maybe. Clear Channel, which has a dozen or so Air America affiliates, has two AM facilities here. If the move-in of Guymon's KGYN ever comes off, I'm thinking CC will move KTOK to 1210 and set up something entirely different (like, perhaps, AA) at 1000. (KEBC, at 1340, will be unavailable; part of the move-in deal is that CC will give the 1340 slot to First Choice, owner of the daytimer KTLV at 1220, which would die once 1210 becomes an Oklahoma City channel.) The other two talk stations in town, Renda's KOKC (previously KOMA) and Citadel's WKY, are struggling in the ratings; I have to assume that they've at least considered the AA package, and turned it down.

(Courtesy of Backcountry Conservative.)

Update: Apparently it lasted less than a year.

Over at Population Statistic, our old pal CT has been wrestling with a question he really doesn't care that much about: is hosiery obsolete?

"Since I'm not really a leg man," he says, "for me the point is moot. Do what you wanna do." Well, it's not even slightly moot for me, but I have to agree with him: do what you wanna do. Unless you're actually dating me, and I'm pretty sure you aren't, my tastes, or lack thereof, should play no role whatever in your wardrobe selection.

Personally, I think McGehee was just tired of answering "What does that name mean?"

The Citizens League of Central Oklahoma held a panel discussion yesterday at Citychurch on the topic "Working Poverty: Is a Living Wage the Answer?" The League, which sponsored an appearance this fall by Barbara Ehrenreich, author of Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Making it In America, thought, rea