Paul "Deacon" Mirengoff, on a gap between Real Life and Blog Life:

Myself, I'm working on somehow fusing the two.

The fall of Saigon propelled thousands of Vietnamese out of their homeland and into the States as refugees, and quite a few found themselves in and around Oklahoma City, sponsored by local citizens or by area charities. And once here, they went to work, partly because the sponsors gave them encouragement, but mostly because, well, that's what they do.

At least, that's what I've always believed. The Oklahoman has been running stories on the Vietnamese in Oklahoma for the past few days, and from this Friday article, something jumped out at me:

Were the refugees in California somehow different from the refugees in Oklahoma? I don't have any reason to think so. Which means that the reason the Oklahoma refugees did so much better, most likely, was the relatively low level of benefits — present-day progressives would presumably call it "stingy" — provided at that time in Oklahoma.

Last summer I wrote about Oklahoma City's Asian District, and quoted local real-estate magnate Tom Waken, whose offices are in the District, as follows:

Which is the sort of thing that works, even in California.

I'm not exactly a dedicated follower of fashion, but I like to think of myself as being at least more au courant than, say, the Courant.

Still, my mind drew a blank upon encountering the phrase "ear threads", even though its meaning should be sort of obvious.

So much for my delusions of fashionista-hood.

(Via the beauteous and more-heavily-pseudonymous-of-late Page, played by Rebecca Romijn.)

With the singular exception of I Capture the Castle, no motion picture has ever caused me more apprehension than has The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, and recent fanboy condemnation hadn't made me feel any better about it.

So I betook myself to Tinseltown this afternoon for the first showing of what I refuse to call H2G2, and I'm pleased to report that it stands up pretty well. I didn't want a straight transcription of the book, or of the radio series, which is where I learned all this stuff; what I wanted was about two hours of visuals that did justice to Douglas Adams' wordplay, and mostly that's what I got, though a few catchphrases I might have liked to have heard once more were conspicuous by their absence. The film departs from Adams' original premise in a couple of small ways and in one large one: the character of Trillian, relatively insignificant before, has been redeveloped into someone sufficiently real to provide some sort of motivation for the otherwise-phlegmatic Arthur Dent. By holy Zarquon's singing fish, he might actually be in love with her, and Zooey Deschanel makes it believable, even as she makes you wonder what, other than a source of entertainment, she ever saw in Zaphod Beeblebrox. Trufans, of course, are supposed to hate this sort of sentimental rubbish.

And there are a few disappointments: the clash between Arthur and the bulldozers isn't as frenetic as I might have hoped, and the Magratheans are given relatively short shrift. But I was quite thrilled with Slartibartfast's factory tour, and Vogon poetry is every bit as bad as I remembered it. If you can think of fifty things that you loved about any earlier version of Hitchhiker's, this new film will deliver on 42 of them.

Earlier this year, I wrote about the Green-walled Garden Club of Frederick, Maryland, which issued a cookbook as a fundraiser in which the recipe sections were set off by photographs of club members, 55 and up, in "varying degrees of undress." (It's still available here.)

Now a California group is doing likewise. Making It with the Canyon Ladies is a fundraiser for the Colman Museum in Centerville, outside Chico. Each of the Canyon Ladies, ranging from fortysomething to eightysomething, poses with an artifact from the Museum.

Did Calendar Girls really start all this? And, more important, do I need another cookbook?

Two buyout firms — Texas Pacific Group and Warburg Pincus LLC — will acquire the Dallas-based Neiman Marcus department-store chain for $100 a share, about $5.1 billion.

Neiman operates 37 full-line stores, 35 under its own name; the firm also owns two Bergdorf Goodman stores in New York (who knew Bergdorf's was still around?), the Last Call clearance outlets, and mail-order house The Horchow Collection.

The success of Neiman Marcus, say analysts, is due to its continued emphasis on high-end products: there is no push to expand to the "near-luxury" market. Neiman's average customer is a woman 45 to 65 with a median annual income of $285,000.

Neiman Marcus operates (of course) zero stores in Oklahoma.

According to this essay on craigslist, there are fifteen reasons why geeky and/or nerdish guys make great boyfriends. One of these, apparently, is fidelity of a sort:

Now if you'll excuse me, I have to go run Defrag.

(Via the eminently-sane Chris Lawrence.)

I truly love stuff like this:

Not to mention a British B-side that overtook its flip to sell a million, and the influence of this tune on American surf music.

And that's just the first half-century of Jerry Lordan's "Apache," recorded by everyone from the Ventures to Stan "Hot Butter" Free, lately a source of hip-hop beats. Even the third-worst musician in the world — I have reference to me — once recorded a version, circa 1976, with my stolid yet fumbling organ work overlaying Free's rhythm bed from four years earlier. (The tape box containing the stereo mixdown of the four-track original has been hermetically sealed and abandoned on Funk and Wagnalls' porch.)

The same article is up at soul sides, complete with sources. Now if you'll excuse me, I have some records to spin.

(Via Jesse Walker at Hit and Run.)

Well, partially:

Hmmm. Actually, no, I don't feel particularly special, but thank you for asking.

(Via She Who Will Be Obeyed!)

A fifteen-pound hamburger? In Clearfield, Pennsylvania, you betcha:

Um, hold the mayo.

There may have been a time when I might have tried to polish off one of those. But there's never been a time when I would have succeeded; I might go through 10½ pounds of ground beef in a month, maybe.

(Via Vinny Ferrari, who also isn't buying.)

Paul Musgrave is amused, or nauseated, or something, by the thought of these people with their clothes off:

I am, of course, a NVIPAA (Not Very Important Person At All), but I'm thinking that wardrobe considerations in a sauna are just about enough to peg the Futility Meter; it's rather disheartening to see allegedly-sophisticated Europeans (who, after all, aren't Americans and therefore are supposed to have cultural values that extend beyond McDonald's and the Hummer) having to be told to doff their duds at 180 degrees Fahrenheit.

And, as Ford Prefect reminds us, it's useful to know where your towel is.

It's rather a long distance — 22 miles — between the west end of the Turner Turnpike at I-35 in north Oklahoma City and the next gate, in Wellston.

Construction will begin next year on a new gate that splits the distance, to be built on Hogback Road, which passes under the Turner east of the Indian Meridian south of NE 164th Street.

Still undetermined is the amount of toll to be charged; for passenger cars, the 22-mile stretch to Wellston costs a buck, minus a nickel if you use PikePass.

The Blog of Henry David Thoreau turns out to be fragments of Thoreau's actual journal, ordered by date if not necessarily by year.

Of course, I had to see this to see if it was running Movable Forts and Magazines v.1.0.

(Via Reflections in d minor, and I'm sure Thoreau didn't wear pajamas, but bear with me here.)

It occurred to me at some point this afternoon that I had put up two consecutive posts containing the same phrase: "Now if you'll excuse me..."

Which, now that I think about it, I've used three times before just since the MT installation in 2002, by which time I'd already accumulated six years' worth of clichés on this site.

Heh. I'm beginning to think I need one of those "unoriginal response" jars.

Based on the events of the last week or so, I have to conclude that Lieutenant Governor Mary Fallin thinks the quickest road to the Governor's Mansion is to paint the Senate as a bunch of do-nothings.

Which, most of the time, they are. The Democrats' powder-taking, reminiscent of the way their Texas counterparts fled quorum calls during the redistricting dust-up in Austin, might be characterized as a tad juvenile. The spectacle of the Republicans doing the same was comparably silly. But the Democrats do have one thing on their side: they can point to Mary Fallin and say "Well, she started it." The state GOP is asking the state Supreme Court just what power Fallin actually has; they could have saved themselves a trip by asking Mike Morgan.

Oh, the pertinent Constitutional passage?

Not the most precise wording, to be sure, but if the writers of the Constitution had intended that the Lieutenant Governor should always preside when present, it's reasonable to assume that they would have said so, rather than go through the trouble of requiring the Senate to elect a President pro tempore in the first place.

And frankly, I'm inclined to distrust anyone's bill when its proponents insist that it should pass without going through a conference committee, even though it didn't get out of committee in the house in which it was introduced.

Anyone for a nuclear option?

The war in Iraq is not appreciably more popular in the United Kingdom than it is in the United States, and it's proving to be a worrisome issue for Prime Minister Tony Blair.

What's worse:

Of course, no one expects anything different from political consultants. And we know what to expect from Bob Shrum:

And, in case you'd forgotten, John Kerry in 2004.

Expect the moving vans at Number 10.

(Via McGehee.)

Governor Henry has appointed State Finance Director Scott Meacham to the State Treasurer slot, replacing Robert Butkin, who is leaving at the end of this month to become dean of the University of Tulsa law school. Butkin's term would otherwise have ended in 2006, at which time Meacham says he'll run for the office.

Budget Division Director Claudia San Pedro will take over as Finance Director.

Cornell University President Jeffrey Lehman, at the school's Mosaic Conference last weekend:

Never mind "our society's understanding of diversity"; what happened to our society's understanding of English? I've read this paragraph three times and the most I can get out of it is "I like the pretty colors." Nothing wrong with that, particularly, but this guy writes like he's being paid by the buzzword.

Criminy. I got accepted at this place, back in the Jurassic period. Maybe I should consider myself fortunate to have wound up elsewhere.

(Via John Rosenberg, who can't make heads or tails of it either.)

Which is, of course, the square of the charge of the electron divided by the speed of light times Planck's constant.

And also the number of weeks we've had the Carnival of the Vanities, the 137th version of which is hosted by Fresh Politics. A week's worth of superior bloggage, just in case you missed it the first time around.

Telephone numbers that ten years ago were rendered as something like 555-2368 are now occasionally appearing with a dot instead of the dash: 555.2368. (This is even weirder-looking when the area code is included: 405.555.2368.) It's not a problem, though, since you don't dial the punctuation anyway.

Now comes a new wrinkle. A local property-management company is rendering in-between addresses in decimal form: they have, for instance, a 1-bedroom apartment, not at 221½ NW 36th Street (not its real street), but at 221.5. This could be troublesome, especially since the Postal Service has what it calls a "standard format" for just about every address to which it delivers, and the standard for this isn't 221.5, or even 221½, but "221 1/2". (Most of your automation systems don't support the ½ character, and the Postal Service loves automation systems: they make junk mail third-class mail profitable.)

When I lived in Charleston, South Carolina, there was a dealer in antiques at the east end of St. Michael's Alley, on the other side of 2. They duly reported their address as 0. The USPS can handle that, at least.

Kirk Kerkorian, last seen in Detroit complaining about the Daimler-Benz/Chrysler merger and how it had cost him mucho dollars, is now seeking to buy up to 9 percent of GM.

What are the chances that Kerkorian will sit back and clip coupons? Next to nil. I mean, this is the man who bought Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer in 1969, sold it in 1986 (to Ted Turner), bought it back before the year was out, sold it again in 1990, bought it back once more in 1996, and finally unloaded it on Sony this year. Obviously GM is far larger than MGM ever was, but Kerkorian is not at all cowed by the General's sheer size. Rick Wagoner, GM chairman, must be wondering what he did to deserve this.

Where Susanna Cornett grew up isn't all that different:

Which reminds me: I have to start planning World Tour '05.

Leaders of the Oklahoma Senate have, for now, buried the hatchet: everyone showed up for a quorum call, Mary Fallin got one more chance with the gavel, and the stalled GOP workers'-comp bill was given one last reading, but wound up in the dustbin on a 26-22 vote against suspending the rules to give it further consideration. (By coincidence, the Democrat/Republican ratio in the Senate is 26:22.)

With this out of the way, perhaps the remaining bills on the subject can be turned into something resembling legislation. As for that hatchet, it may be buried, but you know they remember where they buried it.

Xrlq (rhymes with "strlq") notes that an Assemblyman from Orange County has introduced a bill to require a disclaimer by the Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim to the effect that, well, they're not actually in Los Angeles, which is exactly the sort of consequence that logically follows from the adoption of the second-dumbest team name in recent history.

Which, of course, leads to the obvious question: What happens to "Bears Football presented by Bank One", now that JP Morgan Chase has acquired Bank One?

I am reasonably certain that 42nd and Treadmill will not be participating — and will not be at all happy if I'm participating — in No Pants Day tomorrow.

I don't think it will help if I send them this OU Daily editorial, either.

Did you miss International Respect for Chickens Day? Yeah, me too. I thought at first it might have something to do with Americans for Chicken Safety, but no.

Anyway, the day in question was Wednesday, on which I had (gasp!) fried chicken as the main course at dinnertime. And while I thought I was properly respectful — I have learned, for instance, that it is advisable to at least wear something during the frying process — I suspect that the proponents would have objected to this entrée no matter what steps I took.

Oh, well. I said all that to say all this: Matt Rosenberg wants your chicken recipes. He's already gotten one from me. Keep them simple and, if at all possible, respectful. If there are enough entries, there might even be a prize.

Meanwhile, this being the Friday before Mother's Day, I think I'll work up my mom's stock Friday offering: fish sticks, French fries, and Brussels sprouts.

The ten questions asked by James Lipton on Inside the Actors Studio, originally compiled by Bernard Pivot, have now made it as far as A Small Victory, and, well, if Michele can do these, so can I.

1. What is your favorite word?
   "Wander"

2. What is your least favorite word?
   "Hegemony"

3. What turns you on creatively, spiritually or emotionally?
   The willingness to break beyond the superficial.

4. What turns you off?
   Preconceived notions.

5. What is your favorite curse word?
   Apart from the F-bomb, I tend to fall back on the Modified Savior (as in, say, "Jesus H. Tapdancing Christ!")

6. What sound or noise do you love?
   First rustle of birds an hour before sunrise.

7. What sound or noise do you hate?
   Squealing brakes.

8. What profession other than your own would you like to attempt?
   Teaching.

9. What profession would you not like to do?
   Anything that requires me to deal with self-proclaimed "sportsmen" and that doesn't involve firearms.

10. If Heaven exists, what would you like to hear God say when you arrive at the Pearly Gates?
    "I had a lot fewer doubts than you did, but you know that now."
    

Pass it on, as they say.

Somebody with more than $21,000 to spare is going to buy a Dream Date with Carmen Electra on eBay.

Well, someone 15 to 20 years old, anyway. (The lovely Ms Electra is thirty-three.) And, of course, 17-and-unders can't bid on eBay, but that's another issue entirely.

Meanwhile, I continue to fixate upon [fill in name of female blogger], whose price is far above rubies, let alone Carmen's.

(Via Lawren.)

I don't know which of these is the most upsetting:

1. The fact that Ford of Australia has come up with a reincarnation of the Ranchero;

2. The fact that it's called the F6 Tornado, making light of the very Fujita scale that controls our springs and falls here in the Wind Zone;

3. The fact that they're not going to bring any of them over here.
   

(Via Jalopnik.)

A chap on one of the message boards I read describes himself as a "card-carrying nudist."

Nothing wrong with that, but I really don't want to know where he carries the card.

Today being May 7th, it seems like a good time to exhume "5.7.0.5." by City Boy, a #27 hit in the late summer of '78 that sounds a little like ELO, a little like Queen, and more than a little like Mutt Lange had his hands on it, which he did.

(As always, MP3s evaporate before you know it.)

One of the more reasonable objections to power production by wind turbine is "What if you get enough wind to blow down a turbine?"

Well, there wasn't that much wind yesterday — 12 mph or so — but a tower at an FPL Energy wind farm near Weatherford snapped: two-thirds of the structure came crashing to the ground. The turbine had been operating for only a week when it broke; officials are at a loss to explain how it happened. Power delivery was unaffected.

(Addendum, 9 May, 1 pm: The Faulking Truth reports from the field — hat tip to JMBranum.)

Doc Searls introduces the premise:

We expect so much from "intelligence," despite the fact that our very definitions of it are inconsistent, and even though the tools we have to "measure" it are questionable at best.

And, of course, fitting people into those corporate org charts was the primary motivation for this sort of number-crunching in the first place: find suitably-elevated positions for the ostensibly "gifted," and provide subtle discouragement for those who didn't test well and whose dreams would inevitably be crushed.

This is not any kind of an argument for the abandonment of testing: in an era where no child is supposed to be left behind, there exists a perfectly-legitimate need for the evaluation of students. What we don't need: the compulsion to express those evaluations on a single scale, and the blithe assumption that the scale itself is anything more than a statistical abstraction.

Somewhere in the distant past (well, here, actually), McGehee proposed Paul Giamatti as the person who, in Blogosphere: The Movie, should play me.

Giamatti shows up answering 20 Questions in Playboy this month — the same issue in which I am proven, once again, to have predicted the Playmate of the Year wrongly — and he sounds a little bit like me on some of these:

I demur only on the "hottie glamour women": while I can imagine being Cameron Diaz for a day, a weekend, or whatever, I'm not so sure about Jessica Simpson (the loss of 60 IQ points), Paris Hilton (the possibility of spending long afternoons at the clinic) or Britney Spears (the thought of having to spend time with Kevin Federline).

Still, while obviously I don't have Giamatti's charm, his not-entirely-inexplicable appeal to the babes, or any discernible talent, we seem to be walking in similar shoes. And I definitely liked this bit:

Although noncrud, they tell me, is much, much preferable.

I have no idea how long my blogroll is, and I'm not going to count all the entries thereupon to check. (BlogShares lists 181 under "All Outgoing Links," but this includes items that were linked in entries on the front page the last time they spidered the place.) I have no idea how many other blogs have me on their rolls, though I would guess somewhere around, oh, 181 or so.

And no, I don't use Blogrolling or any of those other aggravation aggregation tools: it's strictly manual. The heading on the roll reads "Blogs I read when I can," which means exactly what it says it does: these are blogs I visit on something resembling a regular basis. I am loath to drop anyone simply because of extended silence, so there are a few entries marked "on hiatus," and there is one (Steven Den Beste) who is not coming back but whom I can't bring myself to delink, who is marked "emeritus."

Which is by way of saying that I run this roll, not to score Brownie points with Technorati or to suck up to N. Z. Bear, but simply as a convenience to me. It contains some A-list names, yes, but it also contains a lot of blogs that don't have A-level audiences — yet.

Aldahlia notes that some people find the very concept of blogrolls hurtful, and gives this notion the sort of scorn I think it deserves:

Why in the world would anyone think something like that?

God forbid there should be a Committee for Fairness to Bloggers. (Why, someone would put up a Blogspot blog just to fisk its findings.)

This is the second time in recent weeks I've had an excuse to link to Joan Baez's "Time Rag", a semi-hilarious rap (yes!) she did in the late Seventies. (The first was here.) What she said:

And yes, my audience has grown, from 6400 over the first three years to about 6400 a week today, but it's not because I've been embraced by the A-list (I haven't) or because I've worked diligently to promote the site (I haven't): it's simply that I turn out rather a lot of words, and sooner or later somebody reads them and finds them somewhat worthy. In other words, there's some truth to that possibly-apocryphal Woody Allen quote about how half/80 percent/90 percent (choose one) of life is just showing up. It's not like I'm anything special, but dammit, I'm here.

What do South Belfast and northeast Tulsa have in common? Michael Bates explains:

And this relates to Tulsa how?

And in Bates' worst-case scenario, the two reform-minded candidates will wind up in a virtual tie for second place while a representative of Business As Usual waltzes into District 5 with a minority of the votes but enough to finish first.

In Oklahoma City, this is the sort of situation that produces a runoff, but not in Tulsa. I have to wonder if this isn't the sort of divide-and-conquer business that's kept the Tulsa power structure in power all along.

A warning from Paul Musgrave:

I dunno. I don't seem to have any problems writing about truly boring stuff.

And some days, the bear eats you. From OKCBusiness:

So the Legionnaires will go to Milwaukee, because:

Hotels in the Reno/Meridian area were more competitive, but they're five to seven miles from the convention center.

We can argue that okay, we're new at competing for top-tier events, we haven't figured out the fine points yet. But we can only play that card once.

(Via The Downtown Guy.)

As far back as I can remember, which is farther than I'd care to remember sometimes, the St Louis Cardinals were on KMOX radio (1120); I used to pick up the games in Charleston back in the 1960s.

Apparently a blowtorch station that reaches about half the states in the Union isn't good enough for the Birds anymore, though:

KTRS, once KSD (I think), is a 5,000 watt regional station that has fairly decent reach but nowhere near the coverage of KMOX, especially at night when the directional pattern kicks in.

I understand the team's wanting to control the product, and the radio market has changed radically in recent years, but this still seems wrong, and Brian J. Noggle knows why:

I expect to have no trouble getting Cards games here in Oklahoma City, but it won't be the same without KMOX.

Over the weekend I mentioned the failure of the city to land the American Legion convention in 2010 at least partially because some people — specifically, the downtown hotel operators — refused to yield on their room rates.

If this Capital of the New Century stuff is going to catch on, the powers that be are going to have to realize that they're still babes in the woods at this level of competition. Mistakes will be made. There's one hard lesson to learn, and everyone who's in the business of promoting this city is going to have to learn it: you can't have everything your way.

A professional street-skating exhibition planned for the Mat Hoffman Action Sports Park down on the river may be moving to Edmond instead because Oklahoma City insists on enforcing a helmet rule on the pros, despite the markedly-lower risk presented by the style of skating involved.

Repeat after me, Parks Commission: you can't have everything your way. Nobody is going to believe that this town has anything to offer if everything that is offered comes with strings attached.

What will we miss out on next?

And one pill makes you small.

And sometimes I get the feeling that the pharmaceutical industry is counting on me to take both of them. Constant drug advertising, coupled with the tagline "Ask your doctor if Suchandsuchium is right for you." Instant demand, whether it's "right for you" or not.

Bruce expands:

And of course, the cost of all this puffery is rolled into the cost of the drug.

Perhaps I was better off with the ones Mother gave me. They didn't do anything at all, but they didn't cost me (or her) a thousand dollars a year either.

According to the old small-p proverb, "The words you speak today should be soft and tender...for tomorrow you may have to eat them."

With the rise of the Net, you may not even have to wait for tomorrow, and someone will be more than happy to shove them back down your throat.

Scenario: North Dakota high-school senior bashes the yearbook faculty advisor on some Xanga site. Said advisor's daughter discovers the post and reproduces it on her blog, with, um, recommendations to the student.

Just one brief passage:

In a different world, this kid would be painting "Romani ite domum" on the walls of the city. For now, he's just going to be screaming for a sitz bath.

Rep. John N. Hostettler (R-IN) sent this out [link is to a Microsoft Word document] last month in an effort to line up sponsors for an unusual piece of legislation:

Actually, I know how much Washington takes from me, and cutting them a check for a couple thousand dollars every three months is far more reminder than I need, but "staggering" is still the right word.

Withholding, you'll remember, was originally implemented as an emergency wartime measure — during World War II. And this isn't the first attempt to get rid of it: Rep. Ron Paul proposed switching to monthly tax payments in 2001.

I doubt that Hostettler's bill will be any more successful than Paul's was, but I'd like to propose an alternative in its absence: require the Feds to pay interest on the tax money withheld. After all, they're preventing the owners of the money from getting any return on it.

(Via Kim du Toit.)

It's called the Unified Theory of Career Nervousness, and Sgt. Mom explains it thusly:

I've never been terribly ambitious, though I'll admit to "sour and embittered." As it happens, though, I never made E-6. (Then again, I was only on the rolls for six years, not eighteen or nineteen, and one doesn't pile up stripes as an inactive reservist, which I was at the end.)

And a commenter to the original post said that insufferability, in his experience, peaked at the E-7 level: "Having received that coveted promotion, they concluded that they were perfect and proceeded to act accordingly."

Apparently this is Orgasm Day in Esperantina, a town in northeastern Brazil.

I assume it comes only once a year.

(Via Cutting to the Chase.)

After the kerfuffle over last December's Lakehoma School musical in Mustang, it was clear something was going to be done, and the something begins this way:

It remains to be seen whether this new policy, adopted by the Mustang school board last night, will be enough to keep everybody happy, but the opening words, at least, seem scrupulously fair. (The full document hasn't been posted yet.)

You don't remember Carlton Cole Magee, but you almost certainly have seen his invention (U.S. Patent #2,118,318, granted in May 1938).

Some years earlier, Carl Magee had wound up on the traffic committee of the Oklahoma City Chamber of Commerce, and one of the problems on his plate was the tendency of people who worked downtown to use up the available parking spaces, leaving few or none for retail customers.

Magee's solution was both elegantly simple and incredibly annoying, at least at first: the city would install meters of his design alongside the streets, which would collect a small fee in exchange for a short period of time. The very first parking meter went into service on 16 July 1935; Park-O-Meter, a firm partly owned by Magee, started up shortly thereafter.

There's no doubt that Magee understood the revenue potential of his little box on a pole: his patent application specifies that the device is for "measuring the ... use of parking or other space, for the use of which it is desirous an incidental charge be made upon a time basis."

Oklahoma City is currently upgrading its downtown parking meters, which gives The Downtown Guy an idea:

Works for me. I suspect that people's irritation with meters will subside, at least temporarily, when they see that very first meter in action.

Incidentally, POM Incorporated, descended from the original Park-O-Meter company, still makes parking meters — in Russellville, Arkansas.

(Ronald B. Luttrell II, who died in 2000, was working on a book about the history of the parking meter; I have borrowed liberally from his notes, some of which are collected at The Parking Meter Page. A few minor changes have been made since the original post.)

I've only glanced at The Huffington Post, and while I can't say for certain that it's full of crap, I suspect that it's a real dog.

And after reading this post last night from Andrea Harris, perhaps three of them.

[insert "seven separate fools" joke here]

I am generally distrustful of things that are pitched as "bipartisan," largely because they're so, well, binary: you got your Democrats, you got your Republicans, and what's left isn't worth a bucket of John Nance Garner's bodily fluids.

The parties in question don't even agree on what "bipartisan" means, as R. Alex explains:

Whether this has anything to do with the GOP's transformation into the Party of Big Government (the Democrats, of course, are the Party of Enormously Huge Frickin' Government), I leave to the pundits. But when donkey and elephant agree these days, I tend to look around for snakes.

One of the graffiti at the Old Economists' Home says: "If you want less of something, tax it."

Jeff Jarvis offers some suggestions:

A few of those, I contend, are at least somewhat arguable.

(A blog tax, you say? Bosh.)

Saw this on the woefully-underused Oklahoma City craigslist:

I am somewhat surprised to hear that Sonic hasn't made it to Portland, Oregon yet. And no doubt some people are surprised that it's possible to miss a place like this, especially if you're twenty-four years old; their reaction is closer to this.

On the other hand, I expect some people to be surprised that Oklahoma City has a craigslist, even though I told you back in February, and I was hardly the first to notice it.

Not too long after LBJ declared War on Poverty, bumper stickers began to appear: I FIGHT POVERTY. I WORK.

Too simple a solution for the policy wonks of the day, and certainly too simple a solution for today, when everything is somebody else's fault.

Today, Walter Williams weighs in with this:

None of these four provisions, you'll note, contains any racial references whatsoever. And if you were thinking of finding some between the lines, La Shawn Barber advises otherwise:

I don't know if I'd characterize its negligibility as "laughable" — where it does exist, it's not all that damn funny — but for the most part, Jim Crow has flown the coop, and nobody this side of Trent Lott misses the miserable bird. There are entirely too many people who resent the idea that life requires effort, and the ethnicity of that group, whatever it may be, is stunningly insignificant in comparison to its self-destructive mindset.

Defamer reports that the soon-to-be-DVDed Director's Cut of Alexander is eight minutes shorter than the theatrical release.

Why would they do such a thing? To, um, straighten it up, perhaps?

Gee, thanks for the cultural stereotype, Bunsen.

Actually, you had us at Rosario Dawson's rack.

Which is twice sixty-nine, not that there's anything wrong with that.

Meanwhile, the 138th Carnival of the Vanities can be seen and enjoyed at Cynical Nation.

In other 138 news, onethirtyeight.com is devoted to the Glenn Danzig era of The Misfits, a fact which deserves an explanation.

The San Francisco Chronicle reports that members of the public who address the Board of Supervisors are expected to adhere to the highest standards of political correctness. Declared Board President Aaron Deskin:

Farging biped.

(Via Tongue Tied.)

SurveyUSA ranks the nation's governors by approval/disapproval ratings, and Brad Henry should probably be smiling: he's doing better than 40 of them.

As of Tuesday, based on data gathered over the previous weekend, 59 percent of the Oklahomans surveyed think the Guv is doing just fine; 30 percent think quite the opposite.

The average is 48/41; bringing up the rear are some people with serious problems, Ohio's Bob Taft being the worst off by a considerable margin. There doesn't seem to be any party preference: Republicans hold the top two and the bottom three slots. Of course, none of this is guaranteed to last.

(Filched from Paul Musgrave.)

Lileks in Camryland:

The closest thing we have to an iconic American automobile these days is the Chrysler 300, a massive, roaring rear-wheel-drive sled that, in its 300C guise, carries a big honking Hemi V8. It's perfect for 1957: why, they actually had a 300C then, a massive, roaring rear-wheel-drive sled that carried a big honking Hemi V8. The 21st-century C, alas, has been shorn of its fins, but it's selling kajillions of units: it's one of the few Detroit nontrucks moving without rebates.

I can't imagine Lileks being bored by one of these. On the other hand, I can't imagine him peeling off thirty-odd large for one of them either.

San Francisco, says Joel Kotkin, is an ephemeral place, a city devoted to "stylish living" above all else:

And its political climate, says Kotkin, runs "from left-liberal to left-lunatic," which would ordinarily suggest a great deal of wailing and gnashing of teeth over job losses — 13 percent in the last five years — and recent declines in "diversity," because urban ethnics can no longer afford to live there. Instead, San Francisco worries about shopping bags and the possibility that a person addressing the Board of Supervisors might commit a verbal faux pas.

For some inscrutable reason, this sort of circus is being held up as a role model for the rest of us. Kotkin reports:

You might think, or I might, that if Oklahoma City really wanted to attract gay people, the city would have mounted a campaign against State Question 711 last year. And besides, however popular Dr Florida's notions may be these days, they seldom translate into actual economic success.

Some of our "emerging professionals" bewail the fact that Oklahoma City doesn't seem to be transitioning into a vacationland for lawyers in love. Right now, I'm more interested in whether they can keep the sewer lines from backing up.

(Via Matt Rosenberg in not-always-delusional Seattle.)

Finally, something is somebody else's fault.

I got my auto-insurance bill for the next six months, and the premium has risen by $36.80 this time around. Since I've had no unfortunate encounters with the law, I immediately pulled out the previous bill and compared notes.

• Bodily injury liability: no change.
  
• Property damage liability: no change.
  
• Comprehensive: no change.
  
• Collision: no change.
  
• Uninsured motorist: up $36.80.
  

Thanks to all of you deadbeats out there who can't, or won't, scrape up the bucks. Please feel free to pass away from high levels of coprophagia.

Is there no decade VH1 doesn't love?

Of course not.

Prepare yourself for I Love the 30s. [Requires QuickTime.]

(Via Screenhead.)

One recurring complaint about Oklahoma in some local circles is that while its population is actually predominantly urban these days, its politics are still fundamentally rural (read "backward"). This is a questionable assumption at best — both houses of the Legislature reflect the population shift to the cities and the suburbs — but the knack of some small-town legislators for seizing the spotlight (think Senator Frank Shurden, D-Henryetta) causes consternation in those folks who think that if only we could shake off this hillbilly stuff we could have the next Dallas, or at least the next Fort Worth.

This notion basically ignores history: there has always been an urban/rural divide in this state, and it's hardly unique to Oklahoma. Julie Neidlinger reports from North Dakota:

Much of what we think of as the Oklahoma character originated out in the countryside. On the farm we learned the basics of fatalism, that a few hours of horrible weather can take out a season's crop; in the small towns we learned that for every person who is content with his lot, there's another who wants out.

The rural population in most states is declining, as people pack up and look for jobs in the cities. But I can't imagine everyone moving: those who remain behind, I suspect, become even more firmly attached to the land. The Oklahoma Panhandle may seem like a vast, empty place, but twenty thousand people live there, and fifty years from now, I'm betting there will still be twenty thousand people living there.

Apparently Oklahoma will lose no military bases under the current Pentagon plan, and will in fact gain nearly 4,000 personnel.

Some local reserve centers will be closed, but the major facilities will remain.

(DefenseLink has the complete list here; you'll need Adobe Reader.)

Scott Johnson has a nice tribute to Stevie Wonder, who turns fifty-five (is that even possible?) today, and whose catalog of recordings is as bright and brilliant as anyone's: the light that never made it through his eyes obviously penetrated deep into his soul.

In the middle Seventies, Motown issued a series of double and triple LPs encapsulating the careers of some of their top-line acts, under the umbrella title Anthology. Stevie balked. It's not that he objected to these glorified greatest-hits albums; it's simply that he thought Anthology suggested some sort of closure, that it represented a statement that his best work was behind him. After some discussion at the highest level (which is to say, with Berry Gordy Jr. himself), the album was eventually issued as Looking Back. By then, of course, Stevie had already made enough great records to fill up three more LPs.

Everybody say "Yeah!"

The Lee Enterprises group has agreed to purchase Pulitzer and its St. Louis Post-Dispatch for $1.46 billion, and one provision of the purchase agreement specifies that Lee will retain the Post-Dispatch's reliably-leftward slant for a minimum of five years, a clause I have to assume was inserted at the request of anguished Pulitzer officials who couldn't bear to see any changes in their beloved paper.

Not that they had to worry, particularly — none of Lee's existing papers have any reputation for rampant conservatism, and Lee doesn't have a habit of dictating editorial policy from the home office — but obviously this was a concern, or Lee wouldn't have bothered to make this assurance in the contract.

I have to wonder if Pulitzer would have fretted so had Lee's headquarters been located in a liberal stronghold like New York or San Francisco, instead of in Davenport, Iowa.

(Via McGehee.)

A couple of weeks ago, a local auction house put up a banner at Harper's Sinclair station at NW 63rd and May, announcing that the property would be sold in June.

What I didn't notice was that Harper was no longer posting gasoline prices, which at the self-service pumps had been consistently one cent below those of the Shell station across the street. Turns out that Harper's was no longer selling gas; the service bays, which are still open five days a week, will close before Memorial Day.

Jim Harper has been running this station since 1957; once it's out of his hands, he and his wife are going to hit the road in an RV.

I mentioned a couple of weeks ago that I was working on converting my Sixties mix tapes to CD, a process which involves a great deal more than hooking up the cassette deck to the sound card and pressing the appropriate buttons. On the off-chance that some of you might be curious as to How I Do It, here's what I went through this morning for Mid-60s Mania Volume 9 (cover art not yet determined):

1.  Review the track list and edit as necessary.
Which, of course, is always necessary in this project, since the tapes were crammed to within a few seconds of their 90-minute nominal capacity and sometimes beyond. The original tape here contained thirty-five songs; six were ruthlessly excised, and one very short one was added at the last minute because (1) it was short and (2) where it was placed made sense.

2.  Select the source material.
About half of these selections were dubbed from CDs I own, although I do own source material for every single one of them. Most of them appear on more than one CD, which means I have to pick the one I think is better. Sometimes it's easy: with "Kind of a Drag," I took the one from Sundazed's Buckinghams compilation, which is the only stereo mix in which the horns don't overwhelm the rest of the instruments during the break. On the other hand, the two CD versions of "Time Won't Let Me," both stereo, were unsatisfactory: the one on the Capitol (later Collectibles) Outsiders compilation has some studio talk, which can be fixed, and a weak remix, which can't, and the version on one of those ubiquitous Time-Life discs (I have three more-or-less-complete series) has the opening drumroll sliced off. Rather than splice the two together, I opted for the 45 version in mono.

3.  Determine the sequence.
In this case, I made no changes except for the deletions (and the one addition). This is not always the case, since I did those tapes to maximize tape utilization, which, given my penchant for auto-reverse units, means a very long Side 1 and a slightly-shorter Side 2. CDs have no such considerations, fortunately.

4.  Apply corrections.
Nero (version 5, anyway) defaults to two-second track breaks; I cut them in half. Two tracks ran much longer than their 45 versions and were trimmed back somewhat; two tracks (including, perversely enough, a Phil Spector production) were remixed for narrower stereo. I toyed with taming the hiss monster on "White Rabbit," but decided otherwise.

5.  Burn away.
This is, of course, the easy part, and it was done (at 8x) in about 10:45.

Artwork comes later, after I audition the final product. Time elapsed from printing the original track list to pulling the CD-R out of the drive: 78 minutes, which is coincidentally almost the playing time of the disc.

Update, October: It took long enough, but you can see the artwork and the complete track listing here.

Rocket Jones has evinced a vaguely-unhealthy interest in a 1977 movie called Chatterbox, which, I must report, I have actually seen. (Worse, I once owned a copy, on one of those old RCA CED NeedleVision videodiscs.)

Actually, it's not as horrid as the synopsis suggests, although the premise is extremely silly. The young lady in question discovers her, um, gift at the conclusion of an indifferent bout of lovemaking: she is grateful to her geekish (and not in a good way) boyfriend, but the Box claims lack of satisfaction. Despairing, she rushes to a shrink, who sees her and Virginia, to give the Box a proper name, as his ticket out of this dead-end profession and into the Big Time.

It's really not all that bad, but it's impossible to describe with any degree of discretion, as demonstrated quite clearly above. The 1988 German film Ich un Er — Me and Him in its English release — is a variation on this theme, with Mark Linn-Baker, for some reason, playing a real prick.

Blogger Christophe Grébert is not at all appreciated by the power structure in his home city of Puteaux, France: last year he was arrested for his commentary, but subsequently released, and now he is being sued by the mayor.

He's taking donations via PayPal to help with his legal woes. Somehow, the sheer joy of annoying French officialdom was enough to coax ten euros out of my wallet.

(Via Doc Searls.)

(Update, 10 am, 15 May: M. Grébert wrote to his donors — seventy-eight so far — to thank them for their participation, which gives him great confidence as he faces his showdown with the mayor, scheduled for the 21st of June. At least, that's what I got out of it with my just-above-menu-level French.)

NewsOK.com has a map of substandard bridges in the state, and there are plenty of them; every county has at least four or more.

The one nearest to Surlywood (there are three within a mile or so) is the May Avenue overpass above Northwest Distressway, which dates to 1952 and carries about 5000 vehicles a day, occasionally including mine. The deck has been downgraded to Critical; the superstructure is Poor, while the substructure holds on to Fair. Redoing this bridge will cost $4.89 million.

It doesn't take a lot of these to get into some serious money. Unfortunately, we do have a lot of these — nearly 7500, in fact — and ODOT's Gary Ridley says the tab for fixing all of them will run $3 billion or so.

This AP wire story about a support group for young transsexuals has apparently gotten under Cole Porter's skin:

Having once been a girl named Jessi, at least for online public consumption, I really can't see what horrible crime against language is being committed here.

It's time for another of Steph Mineart's Big Things trips, where she turns her camera on, well, things that are big.

This time she's in Louisville, a place full of fascination, and plenty of it big. I wish I had some kind of eye for this sort of thing.

My brother got a look at my infamous mid-February television interview today, and he found it, um, highly suggestive of irregularity.

So far, this is one of the kinder reviews.

Somebody apparently thought it would be a really cool idea to pry out all the birds' nests under the eaves at 42nd and Treadmill. It didn't occur to that somebody to remove all the nesting material from the premises, though, so while the War Council gathers in the cottonwood trees to the south, one nest has been rebuilt and a second is under reconstruction.

I don't think it's advisable to park over there today: those birds are pissed.

(Update, 1 pm: Three nests are now operational, and sentinels have been posted. They're not yielding this territory without a fight.)

Make of these what you will.

I have never:

• Eaten oysters.
  
• Visited the Pacific Northwest.
  
• Dated a redhead.
  
• Owned a pickup truck.
  
• Seen Titanic.
  
• Ordered a Big Mac.
  
• Desecrated a Koran.
  
• Attended an NFL game.
  
• Gone skiing.
  
• Looked good on television.
  

(Via Accidental Verbosity.)

Two weeks from tomorrow, Oklahoma City will auction off the old Downtown Library building at 131 Dean A. McGee. The city has set a minimum bid of $950,000, and The Downtown Guy thinks they'll get it:

I think I'd miss the old Fidelity (now Bank of Oklahoma) drive-in: when it was built half a century ago, it was a model for the way these things ought to be done, and it still looks pretty good today. On the other hand, there's a real question of whether you can put up a big-enough structure on the existing library lots: the library itself was only about 64,000 square feet, which wouldn't allow for much in the way of residences (since you'd presumably need an adjacent parking facility), and while downtown retail is certainly something to be desired, the 100 block of Dean A. McGee (or the 400 block of Robinson) is not going to be the first place anyone looks for it.

One thing's for sure, though: we don't need any more office space downtown, at least right this minute.

Update: One bid received, below the reserve price: the city will now try to sell the building outright.

Frighteningly, this makes perfect sense:

Geez, I'm even cheaper than I imagined.

(Via Lifehacker.)

Last fall, the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals dismissed a lawsuit by surviving victims of the 1921 Tulsa race riot, citing the statute of limitations. The plaintiffs had argued that the countdown should begin with the release of the report of the State Commission which investigated the riot, which was published on 28 February 2001, four days less than two years before the suit was filed.

Today the Supreme Court declined to hear an appeal of the 10th Circuit's decision, effectively putting an end to the suit.

We linguistic mossbacks are apparently standing athwart the path of a grammatical and/or sexual revolution:

I suppose it's better than "it," but I submit that persons who "identify outside of a man/woman dichotomy" have issues far beyond mere pronoun usage. Even transsexuals, as I understand them, are binary: they are A and seek B-ness, or vice versa. While I must assume it's possible to live Somewhere In Between, I really have to wonder if this is good for one's — um, hir — social life: does the pool of putative datables increase markedly, or does it shrink to the dimensions of Newspeak?

(Swiped from Joanne Jacobs.)

We have a "sick fascination" with weight and health, says Deb, and maybe it's an inevitable by-product of our increasingly-secular age:

Emphasis added. We can, I believe, control more than we think we can, but anyone who thinks my first priority for the rest of my life has to be shedding these few extra pounds deserves a pie in the face — not that I'm going to waste a perfectly good pie on some shmendrick's face.

Deb continues:

And that demand remains constant, even as the evidence for it dwindles.

Why, yes, I will have fries with that, thank you.

(Update: Deb follows up here.)

Tulsa's MeeCiteeWurkor wonders if his TrackBack function is working.

Actually, he's kind of hoping it isn't, because if it is, it means he's not writing anything worth linking, or so he thinks.

The headline here is instructive:

Not just any driver, but an "SUV driver." The story:

Wouldn't he be just as culpable had he been in a sedan?

The ongoing demonization of the sport-utility vehicle continues, as Kathleen Parker observes:

(Incidentally, this very same Kathleen Parker column was carried in the Sunday Oklahoman; I'm wondering if maybe the staff doesn't read their own paper.)

Might as well give it away in the first couple of paragraphs:

At the moment, StewsStripped.com isn't is working.

Queen of Sky notes:

And no, Q of S herself wouldn't pose for such a thing. I think.

(Updated with a proper Q of S link.)

How far can you get into a book before you decide, well, you're really not into this book? Syaffolee says:

I'm not quite so forgiving: it takes about 60 pages for me to decide whether a book should not be put aside, but thrown with great force. And I've hurled a few, though only a few.

Of course, if I wrote the book, I'll never make it past the Foreword. (I have written no books, and, Lord willin' and the creek don't rise, I never will.)

I spent enough time in Catholic schools to become familiar with what was called the Douay Bible, and most of the verses I committed to memory were taken from versions thereof. (I took three years of high-school Latin, which threw me into the Vulgate, but that's another matter.) Still, the text I found most appealing was one from a different tradition entirely: the Authorized, aka King James, Version, which, to me at least, always stood out for its lyric quality, as though it were written to be performed in public. It is, of course, no coincidence that this was about the same time I was immersing myself in Shakespeare.

A more recent text has emerged, called the English Standard Version, and it looks promising:

Which latter, alas, wasn't the KJV's strong point. And this is the clincher: