Back in the Nineties there was a brief vogue for Web-page ratings using the recommendations of the Recreational Software Advisory Council, which I, contrarian so-and-so that I am, declined to implement:

Today, RSACi no longer exists, and if we're concerned about such things, we have to take matters into our own hands. Julie Neidlinger has done so:

Of course, if you introduce broccoli to the fuzzy bunnies ... but I digress.

Anyway, this is a model for the way these things should be done. And, as Frank Zappa once proclaimed on a warning label:

Unless, of course, you believe they will.

Mister Snitch says the new Fantastic Four movie will be a letdown:

And what's more:

All of these may indeed be true. Still, we're talking my two favorite people in all the Marvel Universe — Sue Storm and Benjamin J. Grimm — and I will be there.

'Nuff said.

Xrlq has revised his to reflect the realities of the times.

I suppose it's time to overhaul mine, which have the virtue of inclusiveness, but which aren't even slightly amusing.

As in C-141 Starlifter, which includes A, B and C models. (Obligatory Oklahoma note: The first C-141A was delivered to Tinker AFB in 1964.)

Otherwise, it's the 141st edition of Carnival of the Vanities, presented this week by Blog Business World. Make it your business to read it.

In April, Florida Governor Jeb Bush signed Senate Bill 436, which authorized the use of force, up to and including deadly force, against intruders and attackers and other nogoodniks.

Now I've always figured that the only good intruder is a dead intruder, and Oklahoma law tends to support this notion. I might have thought that Floridians would be happy about it, but apparently some of them aren't:

Okay, she's not all that Floridian. But what is she saying? Black males are more likely to be attackers or intruders or other nogoodniks than other people? Isn't that, um, sorta racist? And what were those other 100 people in this protest thinking?

Believe me, if you've breached my threshold and thus qualified for a free rib-cage ventilation, my first concern is not going to be the color of the perp; it's going to be how I'm going to get his bodily fluids off my hardwood floors.

(Via LilacRose, where Susan B. asks the same questions.)

Back in the day, I did some spring moonlighting for the Block brothers — mostly H., as no one could remember ever even seeing R. — and I remembered that bribes were considered ordinary income, and that gambling losses were deductible only to the extent of the winnings you reported as income. But this provision is new to me:

And is the owner allowed depreciation for the period in which he is deprived of its use? The mind boggles.

(Via Jacqueline Passey.)

Jennifer McBride in the Oregon Daily Herald supplies ten reasons not to assassinate George W. Bush.

Now I would have thought that two words — "President Cheney" — might have been sufficient discouragement, but evidently it takes more than that up in Eugene.

(Found by Rammer.)

Oklahoma City's Downtown Airpark, across the river from the west side of downtown, is apparently shutting down: the company's offices, on site and at the Clarence Page Airport on the city's far west side, have been closed after 58 years of boom and, more recently, bust.

For the time being, landings and takeoffs will continue, though neither maintenance nor fuel will be available on site.

This could be a blow to the ongoing development along the Oklahoma River, just to the north: access for general aviation could have been a major asset. On the other hand, the land itself might be worth more being used for something else.

Well, an answer, anyway. Developer Grant Humphreys has a plan for the eastern edge of the Flatirons District, east of downtown and north of the Deep Deuce area: Block 42 will incorporate about thirty upscale residences — 1560 to 2728 square feet — at prices averaging around $270,000.

This might well fit into the Master Plan for The Triangle, as proposed by a group of developers. And with the demand for downtown housing projected to grow substantially in the next decade, Block 42 is coming along at the right time; assuming final approval by the Oklahoma City Urban Renewal Authority within 60 days, Humphreys says the first units could be ready next summer.

Still: two hundred seventy K? I know that they're wanting to attract the young urban professional type (I'm trying my best to avoid the Y word), but I suspect that these homes will likely go to more settled folk, possibly connected to the medical-research complexes on the other side of I-235. And anyone willing to trade off floor space for view can buy in at The Classen for $150-200K.

Allen Klein's Abkco Records was for many years the label collectors loved to hate. Sides from Cameo/Parkway Records, which Klein acquired for next to nothing in the late 1960s, have been conspiciously absent from the CD marketplace, and the stuff Abkco did release — compilations by the Animals and Herman's Hermits, the Rolling Stones' Decca recordings, and a box of Phil Spector material — was half-heartedly mastered and (especially the Spector box) woefully overpriced. Worse yet, Abkco, which controlled Sam Cooke's Tracey Records catalog, actually sued to get an RCA Cooke compilation off the market, because it included one track ("Another Saturday Night") which they said belonged to them. RCA responded by reissuing the collection with the track excised, but the damage was done.

For reasons unknown, though, Abkco has been mending its ways. The first ray of light was "Keep On Movin'," a Sam Cooke compilation that included the major Tracey tracks; they have since issued box sets on Cooke and on his SAR label, plus a biopic on DVD. The Stones, Animals and Hermits material has been remastered from better source material and reissued.

The Herman's Hermits issue (Retrospective, Abkco 9228-2) features twenty-six tracks, from "I'm Into Something Good" to "Here Comes the Star," the group's last British hit from late 1969. (The American well had dried up a year or so before.) Compared to MGM or Abkco's own vinyl, this is remarkably clean, and while it would have been nice to have the stereo mix of "A Must to Avoid," at least they got the correct version of "Leaning on a Lamp Post," something MGM always seemed to be confused about. And there is one actual stereo track: "Museum." If you've been nursing a crush on Peter Noone all these years, you need this disc.

Retrospective is also the title of the Animals disc (Abkco 9325-2), with twenty-two tracks, more than half of which Klein didn't own and actually paid to license. The Mickie Most/EMI material is generally fairly clean, though it's clear Most overdid it on the levels in a couple of places, and "Boom Boom" has a few extra bars in its instrumental break, which I wasn't expecting. The most grievous fault of the previous release — the UK, rather than US, version of "We Gotta Get Out of This Place," which has a different lead vocal — has been fixed. I could carp that "Don't Bring Me Down" is in mono, but at least they went to the trouble to get it and subsequent Animals tracks from Decca/Universal, and everything else that was released in stereo on vinyl is in stereo here. The last track is the usual 4:01 radio edit of "Spill the Wine" by Eric Burdon and War, about 50 seconds shorter than the LP track or my copy of the single, and a lot less noisy than either.

Both these discs are SACD hybrids: played on SACD machines, they're supposed to sound even better. I don't have one and couldn't check this claim.

And Cameo/Parkway? We'll talk about that next time.

An anonymous observation from craiglist:

Must be Choctaw. Midwest City is even blacker than OKC (19.5 versus 15.4 percent, per city-data.com). I guess some people are, you should pardon the expression, easily spooked.

And anyway, there are plenty of streets I think are scarier than 23rd. NE 10th, before it peters out west of Martin Luther King, often gives me the creeps, but then the last near-death experience I had in a car was along 10th, so take this with large quantities of sodium chloride.

NE 4th, late at night — which was my commute back in the middle 80s when I lived in the northeast quadrant and worked swing shift downtown — has a sort of not-even-vultures-will-live-here quality to it, and it still has EPA Superfund sites on it, making it seem even worse than 10th, which used to have one (the old junkyard east of Bryant), which since has been capped and taken off the list.

There was, and is, one major difference between your online friends and your friends in Real Life™: when your online friends go, it takes forever to find out about it.

Dennard Summers died on the 8th of May, still in his thirties. In his real life, he was a music and media writer — for a while, he ran something called Pittsburgh Media Insider — and most recently, he had established himself as the producer of Steel City Video Mix, a public-access cable series. Our paths crossed first in 1999, when our common interests intersected: I was collecting examples of female invisibility in the media, and he was doing bluescreen work and archiving precisely the sort of still photos I was looking for. A mailing list grew out of this; there are now well over 100 subscribers.

Word didn't get back to Pittsburgh bloggers until last week, and the mailing list was informed late last night, though I didn't check it until this morning.

For a while, members of the group styled themselves "The Hole in the Air Gang." Today, the Gang has a hole of its own, one which will be impossible to fill.

Fare thee well, old friend, and remember: in the next world, there is no digital-rights management.

If you're about to run up your MasterCard to get a new laptop computer, Syaffolee knows the questions to ask:

My own little Road Warrior, a Toshiba Satellite, vintage 2002, gets more use on the road than it does at home. It has a CD burner/DVD player. I carry a PC Card with a Wi-Fi adaptor and, well, a five-dollar LAN cable. It's not too light, but not too unwieldy either. Battery life is an unimpressive two hours, which declines markedly with use of the optical drive. It's never given me a bit of trouble, though 42nd and Treadmill bought two of the same model for its traveling staff, and the troglodytes therein managed to kill them both in less than nine months.

This year's Sovereignty Symposium incorporated one classic, or at least warmed over, bit of political heat, courtesy of Citizen Potawatomi Nation chairman John "Rocky" Barrett.

Gaming has brought economic good fortune to Native Americans, says Barrett, but a vast right-wing conspiracy threatens the tribes, including the oil industry, Rep. Tom DeLay (R-TX) and Sen. James Inhofe (R-OK), who presumably won't stand for that sort of thing:

Barrett also objected to the compact between the State of Oklahoma and various tribes enacted as the result of the passage of State Question 712 last year, which he characterized as the "stupidest, most absurd" agreement ever developed. Scott Meacham, state treasurer, was happy to point out that the Citizen Potawatomi were among the first in line to file for membership in the compact.

Carolyne Mas and I go back a long way: I put up the very first fan page for her back in 1997, and she promptly called me to tell me what I'd gotten wrong, an early example of having my backside fact-checked.

Steve Burgh produced her first two albums for Mercury, a quarter-century ago; they met up again in 1999 and cut some sides, four of which turned up on her 2003 release, Beyond Mercury. (There must be something about that label; Graham Parker, once shut of them, recorded a single called "Mercury Poisoning.") When Burgh died this year, Mas decided to put out the remaining six tracks, which with the four previously-released items comprise Brand New World, just released on her Savage Juliet imprint.

You can get this disc from her Fan Club, or from CD Baby once they get stock. (There was an MP3 here briefly, but only just.)

You can hardly blame Dan Dill. At the end of 2004, he snapped up Heritage Park Mall for $4.1 million; a brace of California investors has now taken it off his hands and given him a tidy profit for the brief period he owned it.

The $7.8 million price is still below the appraised value of the mall; tenants are still waiting to see if anything improves. I'm starting to think it may be too late, myself: the focus of new activity in Midwest City is far to the south, with a not-quite-Super Target, a Lowe's, and a Kohl's all taking spots on the north side of SE 29th east of Air Depot, and a new Sheraton hotel near I-40 and Sooner Road. None of these is within two miles of the mall.

Well, there's the new Wal-Mart Supercenter at NE 23rd and Douglas, but that's even farther away.

I have never had a great deal of faith in fetal-monitoring devices, and this doesn't help.

I upgraded both Firefox (to 1.0.4) and QuickTime (to 6.5.2) on my work box yesterday, which had the non-salutary effect of causing rather a lot of Web pages to display incorrectly. After a period of cursing, investigation, and recursing, I determined that at some point during these processes, Macromedia's Flash and Shockwave plugins were somehow screwed; reinstalling them seemed to restore some semblance of normal operation.

Needless to say, this is a Wintel box. And one does get used to failures on Wintel boxes, no matter how inconvenient, but "get used to" does not translate into "appreciate."

Which makes me wonder what sort of hell Francis W. Porretto was put through, to motivate him to post the Curmudgeon's Laws of The Adequate Device Driver, a list of ten desiderata, on which typical Windows systems can count on, oh, 0.5 or so.

How many Bush administration officials does it take to screw in a light bulb? I guessed two — one to assign the contract to Halliburton, and one to overlook the cost overruns — but Aldahlia says ten.

(Hmmm. Second list of 10 items I've noted today.)

Last week, I posted this business about one particular local mindset that perplexed me: the notion that the Bricktown entertainment district, rather than being allowed to evolve, should be given a sharp push — presumably according to some, um, "intelligent design" — in the direction of young and hip and "urban."

The Downtown Guy brought this notion in front of his readers, and the discussion there has gotten interesting. A few excerpts from his commenters, very slightly edited by me, and my responses thereto:

Nothing at all wrong with originality. But I'm not at all persuaded that originality, in and of itself, is necessarily an unalloyed boon; the farther out on the weirdness asymptote you go, the smaller an audience you can expect. While I'm not at all disinclined to see edgy and unorthodox developments in a town that has damned few of them, I believe that these things take root and grow on their own: you can't really direct the process from outside.

Apart from my gun-jumping, this neatly encapsulates the issue here: Bricktown's success is due to its ability to draw people who think of themselves as suburbanites in addition to those who consider themselves urban in orientation. It's an uneasy balance, and maintaining that balance is, I think, more important than trying to push the district a notch or two toward either side.

I've been to Waterloo Records in Austin; I spent rather a lot of money last time I was there, in fact. The closest music outlet to Bricktown is a CD Warehouse in Automobile Alley, and while I'm glad it's there, it's simply not in the same league. I don't see Neimans or Nordstrom making any moves in this direction, though Saks has a Tulsa store (in Utica Square). Some greater restaurant variety would indeed be welcomed; right now, if I'm thinking dinner date, I'm more likely to go for Western Avenue than Bricktown.

It has. (I started at UT Austin in 1969, and Sixth Street was already moving towards funkiness.) And time is always a factor: it took about thirty years to turn a decaying uptown corridor into the Asian District. Still, I think "upscale" is, well, "scalable," if only because having a great deal of disposable income is simplified by not having to spend an ungodly amount of money on housing, one of the major draws of this part of the country. (Yeah, you probably won't earn as much, either, but the Feds will be taking less away, which surely helps.)

No argument from me.

And, to close out, something I probably should have said, but didn't:

I'll drink to that. Even in a Bricktown sports bar.

The credits on Procol Harum's "A Whiter Shade of Pale" have always read: music, Gary Brooker; lyrics, Keith Reid.

Matthew Fisher, Procol's organist, has maintained for some time that he contributed at least as much as Brooker — and, for that matter, as Johann Sebastian Bach — to the song. From a BBC interview in 2000:

Comes now this notice on Fisher's Web site:

It's probably a safe bet Brooker didn't turn cartwheels 'cross the floor when he was so served.

Philadelphia's Cameo label was a newborn at the beginning of 1957 and was all but dead by the end of 1967. Still, Cameo and its Parkway sibling sold a few zillion records in those years, and the majority of them have been out of print ever since.

The biggest help to the company in its early years, no doubt, was the fact that it was in Philadelphia, about three miles from WFIL-TV and American Bandstand, and if Dick Clark happened to need a guest star one afternoon, Cameo/Parkway was more than happy to supply one of its acts. As Bandstand grew, so did C/P, and the show's ability to break teen idols nationally paid off handsomely with C/P's Bobby Rydell and Chubby Checker.

It couldn't last, of course. By 1964, Rydell was off the charts, Checker was recording folk music, and the airwaves were full of invading Brits. Worse, Bandstand had moved to Los Angeles. And founder Bernie Lowe, wondering what had gone wrong, sold out. The new management fumbled for awhile, then started to click again, but the glory days were over, and in 1967, the labels were sold again, this time to Allen Klein, who had better things to do than to run a record company, fercrissake.

The new Cameo/Parkway 1957-1967 box, on Klein's Abkco label — which, history records, is the legal successor to Cameo/Parkway — attempts to give an overview of the eleven years when the labels were active, and while it's possible to gripe about some of the bigger hits that were excluded (none of Checker's folk tunes made it), the emphasis is sensibly placed on the smaller acts. Besides, the big names will presumably have their own compilation discs eventually.

In 1964, C/P, like every other American label, was anxious to tap into the British Invasion, and they chose to do so by licensing tracks from the Pye label in England. They got early tracks by the Kinks (who were later signed to Reprise), the Ivy League, ex-Beatle Peter Best (represented here by "Boys," a Shirelles tune which the Fab Four themselves had recorded with Ringo on lead, which should fulfill your minimum daily irony requirement all by itself), but scored only one actual hit: "Cast Your Fate to the Wind" by Sounds Orchestral.

Perhaps less well-known was C/P's mid-1960s dabbling in what became Philly soul. Eddie Holman and the Delfonics both cut early sides for C/P before moving on to greater success elsewhere, and Bunny Sigler, one of the Gamble/Huff organization's main acts, made his reputation with a couple of Parkway tracks.

And Neil Bogert, when he took control of C/P in late 1965, headed to the Midwest in search of music; he brought back the Rationals, Bob Seger, Terry Knight and the Pack, and the ineffable ? and the Mysterians, whose "96 Tears" was Cameo's last-ever Number One.

Drooling collector geeks (whose number certainly includes yours truly) have been pestering Abkco to get this material out for years. Decades, even. No one knows for sure why it took so long; there were rumors that tapes were missing, that royalty disputes had gone unresolved, that Klein was waiting for certain individuals to die off. And this is the one question that Jeff Tamarkin doesn't answer in the liner notes. At this point, though, it's more important that the stuff is available at all, and the sound is definitely better than you'll find on bootleg versions, though there's only one stereo track (a Patti LaBelle and the Blue Belles version of "You'll Never Walk Alone") in the bunch. (Which means, I suppose, that "Cast Your Fate to the Wind," which has appeared elsewhere in stereo, is making its first-ever mono CD appearance.) And the price — $60, but not hard to find for ten bucks or so below that — is within reason. Besides, where else are you going to find Cool Ghoul John Zacherle's "Dinner with Drac"?

The Chinese automotive market is now the world's third largest, ahead of Germany and closing in on Japan. China, however, is not any kind of driver's paradise, and Ian Hamet turned conjured up this paragraph in The Misanthrope's Guide to Shanghai which is even more unsettling:

I was just about ready to snicker at this when I caught this in The Economist:

Suddenly I don't feel so apprehensive about driving in Massachusetts (!) this summer.

As the phrase goes, I've been poor, and I've been, um, less poor. Perhaps on the global scale I might be considered "rich" these days, in the sense that I don't have to rearrange the budget should I fancy a cherry turnover some morning, but where I see myself is somewhere below the middle of the middle class. (Then again, in years gone by I've tended to see myself as somewhere near the top of the lower class, although we're not supposed to use terms like "lower class" in these hypersensitive times.)

Economic class, however, has a little more volatility than we're generally willing to admit, as a few hundred folks in Bluebird Canyon found out recently; a million-dollar asset can become almost worthless in a matter of moments. "Nature," we are reminded, "bats last."

Although I don't think I'd put it quite as baldly as this:

Probably not: the politics of envy is now firmly established in the American system. ("Economic justice," indeed.) Still, no matter how rich you are, you can't afford to be smug about it; there are always forces beyond your control.

(By way of Xrlq in the O.C.)

I learned a long time ago that I was no longer valued as an audience member by the commercial-radio industry; I'm too old and I can't be persuaded to listen to the stuff they're most anxious for me to hear. Still, it never occurred to me to mourn.

Until Michele said this:

WCBS-FM continues to issue forth some semblance of an oldies format at its Web site, but much of the value of radio is in its portability: if you can't listen to it in the park or on the freeway, why bother?

Here in the Okay City, KOMA is giving more airtime to 70s tunes, but their playlist hasn't expanded; they've simply divested themselves of that ancient 50s stuff that people like me (and Michele, who is just about a whole decade younger than I am) still cherish. Fortunately, I still have my records.

Writers of soap operas shy away from almost no terms that pertain to women. But when it comes to men, says Meryl Yourish, there's a vas deferens:

Megan McTavish, what hath thou wrought?

Jon Ledecky's Big Train Holdco (named for Hall of Famer Walter "Big Train" Johnson, who pitched 21 seasons for the Washington Senators) is one of a number of groups seeking to buy the new Washington Nationals baseball club, currently owned by the other twenty-nine Major League Baseball teams and due to be sold this summer, perhaps for as much as $300 million. (MLB acquired the team, then the Montreal Expos, for $120 million in 2002.) One of the investors in BTH is leftist billionaire George Soros.

Should BTH prevail, the White House won't take the looming presence of Soros lying down, says Eric at Off Wing Opinion:

Does Anaheim Los Angeles get to go first?

Sean Gleeson's trip into the very heart of the Net begins with a familiar visitor:

Okay, this is hardly the pivotal paragraph, but I'm a sucker for, um, vivid imagery. A comic flaw, like Kasenetz-Katz.

Four weeks from today, I hit the road for my fifth annual World Tour and Celebration of Internal Combustion. This year's destinations were chosen on the basis of Not Been There, Not Done That: there are only two states east of the Mississippi which I have never visited — Maine and Rhode Island — and fortunately for me and my fuel budget, they are in relatively close proximity to one another.

The actual route has yet to be set, though there will definitely be a stop in Philadelphia (thank you, Donna), and one or two others will probably suggest themselves in the next few days as I peer into the old Rand McNally.

I expect this trip to take 17 days, cover 5,000 miles, and cost $2,800. We shall see.

Washington State actually issued this plate, then cancelled it after four months.

It's up for auction on eBay as we speak (minimum bid $5000).

Washington Mutual, the nation's largest S&L, has announced the acquisition of Providian Financial, one of the top ten card issuers, for $6.45 billion.

Providian is profitable these days, after a near-death experience brought on by massive defaults among its largely-subprime customer base and the company's own manipulation of payments to maximize late fees, which drew lawsuits. Forced into a corner, Providian shed most of its lower-quality accounts; they have also entered into partnerships with eBay and PayPal.

Washington Mutual, perhaps mindful that it has no experience running a credit-card operation, plans to leave the Providian apparatus largely in place; layoffs once the deal closes are unlikely.

Analysts are expecting more mergers in Plasticland, with huge MBNA and less-huge Metris believed to be in play.

It's flip-flop season, and CT is not thrilled:

I have no reason to think I'm especially fortunate or especially pervy, but the below-ankle scenery around here is actually pretty good these days, although multiple toerings (I know one woman who used to wear three and now wears four) probably would qualify as overkill.

Besides, every pair of flip-flops worn means someone is not wearing these hideous fur boots.

Everybody who burns the occasional audio CD knows the drill: 650 MB/74 minutes, or (far more common these days) 700 MB/80 minutes. I've run a few discs up to the 79:45 mark before, but never before did I attempt 80:00.05.

And Nero (version 5.5) balked. Not enough space, it insisted. I reedited a couple of fadeouts and got it down to 79:59.55. (Before you ask: I had changed the default 2-second between-track spacing already.)

No soap.

I did a tighter fade on two more songs. At 79:58.30, it took.

It's gotta be that damn digital. Most of my 90-minute cassettes run 91:45 or thereabouts.

The state has laws against placing memorials by the side of the road, though they tend not to be particularly strict about enforcement: after all, somebody died there.

On the other hand, it's possible to abuse a privilege, and the placing of about 3000 crosses by a lobbying group hoping to win support for a fuel-tax increase would certainly thus qualify.

Why are these things illegal, you ask? They're considered a distraction to drivers, and therefore a safety hazard.

Neal McCaleb, head of Oklahomans for Safe Bridges and Roads, says that if his group's crosses should be removed, so should everyone else's.

I think I've just made up my mind on SQ 723.

I just love this: Jacqueline Passey fuses John Napier to John Kricfalusi.

It's better than bad; it's good.

The majority opinion in the Supreme Court's 6-3 ruling in Gonzales v. Raich contained this statement from Justice Stevens:

Which prompted this response from Ravenwood's Universe:

And Aldahlia considers the situation in California:

Do I hear a cry of "Judicial activism!" out there?

Certainly not from the Bushniks.

Norway, thanks to North Sea oil the third-largest exporter of petroleum, has been socking away spare kronor in a Petroleum Fund, a hedge against the time when the pumps will presumably start sucking air. To avoid undue influence on the Norwegian domestic economy, the Fund buys overseas equities only.

And for a while, the Fund held about $52 million of Kerr-McGee stock, but Norway has announced that the Fund has sold all its KMG shares and will do no further business with the company.

The reason? KMG is engaged in offshore oil exploration off the Western Sahara, a region annexed by Morocco in 1975, and the Fund's ethics advisors said that this was "a particularly serious violation of fundamental ethical norms ... because it may strengthen Morocco's sovereignty claims and thus contribute to undermining the UN peace process."

Kerr-McGee points out that the UN itself reviewed, and approved in 2002, their permit from the Moroccan government. The company did not, so far as I know, burst into guffaws at the mention of the phrase "UN peace process."

After a week of nothing happening, the top of the trench has been filed down, not exactly smooth, but decidedly closer to flat than it was when the pipe was laid.

I have no idea whether the fact that I mentioned the lull to the president of the Neighborhood Association had anything to do with this sudden upsurge in activity.

The terrain is still kinda bumpy, but then it was kinda bumpy before.

The Oklahoma Gazette's OKG Free Classifieds, one has to assume, is an effort to fill a niche that in most metro areas is occupied by craigslist.

It might actually be working, too; last time I looked there were 200 postings to the OKC edition of craigslist, but 371 to OKG Free.

Still, there's plenty of room for both, I think.

Disclosure: I started this last night with the following statement:

I couldn't think of an adequate follow-up, so I shoved it onto the back burner to await an opportunity.

Such as, well, this non-screedy Bleat from Lileks:

Nothing so far has pointed me to where I want to be, but then I'm not entirely sure where that is. I do know this much, though: the possession of Actual Verified Education in my, um, profession of the moment is far more likely to be a liability than an asset.

If you can't bestir yourself to go to the trouble of putting actual paper in the remote printer, there's very little reason for me to answer system messages about it, y'know?

How the mighty have fallen. Tony Blair comes to America with hat in hand and is sent away without even the hat; Jimmy Carter is reduced to pleading on behalf of the scuzzballs at Guantanamo; and, perhaps most startlingly, Francis W. Porretto passes on a meme. What is this world coming to?

Oh, well. To the business at hand:

1. The number of books I own.
It seems churlish actually to count them, but my best guess is 1100. (There are also about 1200 magazines around here, boxed, and not particularly neatly boxed at that.)

2. The last book I bought.
Kim du Toit's novel Vienna Days.

3. The last book I read.
Laurie Notaro's memoir (or whatever it is) We Thought You Would Be Prettier.

4. Five books that mean a lot to me.

• Dodie Smith, I Capture the Castle
  
• H. Allen Smith, How to Write Without Knowing Nothing
  
• Robert Townsend, Up the Organization: How to Stop the Corporation from Stifling People and Strangling Profits
  
• Mark Twain, The Tragedy of Pudd'nhead Wilson
  
• Meredith Willson, Eggs I Have Laid
  

Pick up on it if you like; I hate inflicting these things on people.

We tip our cowboy hat here to the late Mr. Frank Gallop, who so sonorously intoned "The Ballad of Irving," the saga of the 142nd fastest gun in the West, a #34 pop hit (on Kapp 745) in 1966.

On an unrelated topic, the 142nd edition of Carnival of the Vanities is galloping your way from The Conservative Edge, a week's worth of superior bloggage that's easier to schlep than a salami.

Macaulay Culkin, busted last year on I-44 near the Kelley Avenue exit, entered a guilty plea today to misdemeanor charges of possession of controlled substances — Xanax and marijuana — and was given a one-year deferred sentence on each of the two charges. Culkin also paid $940 in court costs.

Culkin and friend Brent Tabisel were driving to Los Angeles from New York — Tabisel was at the wheel of their rental car — when they were pulled over for doing 70 mph in a 60-mph zone (yeah, right) and making an improper lane change.

Fenceposts are up, which can mean only one of one thing: they're getting ready to replace the fence.

Good gracious, they might actually have all this finished by Friday afternoon.

Um, no, I won't be visiting the City of New York this year.

And if the insufferable bastards of the Blame America crowd have their way, you can extend that promise until eternity.

If they must have a place for their Celebration of Man's Inhumanity to Man, allow me to offer a suggestion:

1. Crash a jet into the UN Secretariat Building.

2. Voilà! Instant site.

Here's Terrye, commenting at Roger L. Simon's site. She gets it:

Damned right.

I am just tickled about this:

And we'll get to hear it pretty soon, too: music publisher Bärenreiter-Verlag will issue the score this fall, and Sir John Eliot Gardner is working on a recording.

The song, for soprano with strings and continuo, was written for the birthday of the Duke of Saxony-Weimar, for whom Bach was court organist at the time.

I'm thinking this will turn up at lots of recitals in the next couple of years.

(Swiped from Rocket Jones.)

H.D. versus H.D. Contrast and compare.

Janice Rogers Brown has been confirmed by the Senate, to the delight of some and the despair of others.

On the delighted side, Susanna Cornett:

On the "despair" side of the ledger is People for the American Way. President Ralph Neas, on Brown's ascension to the D.C. Court of Appeals:

To support this, PFAW has offered a selection of Brown's speeches and California Supreme Court decisions. To me, this one stood out:

I don't have any reason to think Ralph Neas finds moral depravity entertaining, particularly, but I suspect he rather chafes at the notion that there might be an objective definition of "virtue."

And the present-day definition of "equal opportunity," which calls for the most absurd tilts in the playing field in the hopes of making the results look good. or at least proportional, is far more of an offense to justice than anything Justice Brown has proposed.

Jalopnik reports that Vivid Entertainment, hitherto on my personal radar only as a purveyor of triple- or fourple-X videos, is entering the aftermarket automotive-wheel business.

Fortunately, they've already used the obligatory rim-job joke. And frankly, I can't see myself calling up these guys and asking for 18 inches minimum.

Chase McInerney, on the newer, svelter Ronald McDonald:

Okay, it's not precisely the same dynamic, but it sounds good.

Visitor #750,000 (from 68.33.220.96, allegedly in Baltimore) waltzed in here at five seconds past 8 pm Central, and promptly disappeared into the log.

That's fifty thousand since the 12th of April, not all of whom were wondering what the heck they were doing here. I think.

I don't know how many people have asked me why I do this.

It never occurred to me, though, to ask why they don't.

So: If you don't blog, why not? It's not like you don't know what it is or anything, else you wouldn't be here watching me.

There is no shortage of fire stations in the central part of Oklahoma City, but the growth of the Bricktown district and points to the north and east has suggested to City Council that maybe there ought to be one more; this week, the Council has decided to hire an architect and start the ball rolling for a Bricktown fire station.

Existing fire stations near downtown:
No. 1, 820 NW 5th
No. 4, 100 SW 4th
No. 5, north end of Winans Park (NW 22nd and Broadway)
No. 6, 620 NE 8th

A police substation is under development at 219 East Main (the old Rock Island depot), replacing the temporary location on Sheridan near the canal.

These days, says Matt Rosenberg, downtown Vancouver is full of crap:

(Original here. )

Vancouver, you'll remember, has a "supervised-injection site," a location where heroin addicts will be supplied with clean needles and high-grade H, in the interests of, um, well, it certainly can't be keeping them off the street, can it?

Much is made of Oklahoma's high incarceration rate, and while it's possible to argue that we lock up way too many people for drug-related offenses, it's also pretty clear that someone behind bars has a lower probability of taking a dump on the sidewalk.

I can't help but wonder if maybe the most rational policy here might be good old Moynihanian benign neglect: let them be, let them pursue their highs without fear of arrest, and let them quietly expire when the drug, as it will, exacts its price.

Still, "rational" has little to recommend it in the feel-good department, so I'd be happy to entertain other ideas.

Warren Bell proposes a new telecom service:

Well, okay, but I'm not buying unless there's some way to turn the SOB off entirely. I mean, Judith H. Christ, I may not want to be available to the whole freaking world 24/7/365.

Not quite two weeks ago, I came up with this:

First blaze in this particular trail:

This is, of course, far from a done deal, but, to borrow a phrase, I told you so.

(Via Greg Angelo.)

Michele, I understand, loathes Bull Durham, so I am not inclined to quote Kevin Costner's too-often-quoted "I believe" spiel here.

On the other hand, I don't have any problem posting a rewrite of it, and here's a good one from Steph at The Song in My Head:

And yes, I tried this myself, way back in December 2000.

Si Waronker has died, and this matters to me because Si (Simon, his mother called him) Waronker was the founder of Liberty Records, one of the great West Coast independent labels, which would have celebrated its 50th anniversary this year had it remained an independent label.

Si's tastes ran to jazz, orchestral and movie music — his first release (#55001) was a Lionel Hampton single ("The Girl Upstairs" b/w "Conquest") — and his first big hit was #55006, Julie London's "Cry Me a River." But he was also looking for new and distinctive stuff, which is how he came to sign Alfi and Harry, despite the name actually one person, a fellow named Ross Bagdasarian, who subsequently produced a number of interesting novelties for the label under the name "David Seville."

Seville's biggest hit was a weird little number called "Witch Doctor" (Liberty 55132, 1958), with two voice tracks, both by Seville, but one of which was speeded up past all understanding, until it sounded like the chattering of a chipmunk. "Witch Doctor" actually made Number One, and Seville reasoned that if one funny voice was good, three must be better. The Chipmunks debuted that fall with a sappy-but-sweet Christmas song ("The Chipmunk Song" aka "Christmas Don't Be Late", Liberty 55168) in which Seville rode herd, albeit in a kindly manner, over his three rodent charges, one of whom he had named "Simon" after Si Waronker. (Before you ask: Theodore Keep was Liberty's chief engineer; Alvin G. Bennett was Waronker's second-in-command.) It was the fastest-selling record ever up to that point, and charted every fall as late as 1962.

Waronker also moved into that weird rock-and-roll stuff, signing Eddie Cochran, Bobby Vee, and Jan and Dean. Al Bennett was essentially running the company when Waronker decided to sell out in 1963; Bennett remained in charge until the Transamerica takeover five years later. (EMI owns the catalog today.)

Lenny Waronker, Simon's son, had worked at Liberty's Metric Music publishing outfit before moving to Warner Bros. in 1966; he eventually became president of the label, departing in 1995 after a corporate shakeup.

All this, of course, is ancient history, and today there are tiny indie labels, monstrous corporate collections of labels, and nothing in between. Probably why there's nothing on the radio right now.

A chap named The Old Downtown Guy can be seen occasionally commenting on the blog of the presumably younger Downtown Guy, and TDG the Elder was accorded space to write a post of his own, which I excerpt here:

Links added by me. The marketplace does work: if there's enough of a demand, eventually there will be a supply. TDG the Elder understands:

And for every couple of steps forward, there's one step back, or occasionally to the side, a series of motions made more interesting by the fact that not everyone agrees on which way we're going in the first place.

Finally, The Old Downtown Guy calls for the Oklahoma City Urban Renewal Authority to quit hiding in the shadows:

The Authority is a public body, but over the past forty years it's managed to reduce its accountability to the public to near zero. City government otherwise is open to scrutiny; it's time to open up the Authority's agenda and proceedings to the rest of the world.

While Saab continues to throw rebadged Subarus and Chevrolets at its US buyers, it's building a 9-5 BioPower model for the Swedish market that runs on gasoline, on ethanol, or anything in between.

The 2.0-liter turbo four is pretty standard Saab fare; what makes it different is the revised fittings (heavy doses of ethanol play hell with a car's fuel system, proving that cars really do reflect their drivers) and the revised engine-control software to adjust for whatever is coming through the fuel line.

Conventional wisdom holds that ethanol is less desirable as a motor fuel because of its lower energy density; to get the same performance, you'll end up with fewer miles per gallon. The Saab, however, tunes itself to get maximum value out of grain alcohol: while the engine produces a respectable 148 hp and 177 lb-ft of torque on gasoline, feeding it a mix of 85 percent ethanol and 15 percent gasoline, which costs about 25 percent less than straight gasoline in Sweden, yields 180 hp and 207 lb-ft of torque, with about the same mileage. (Performance figures from Automobile Magazine, July '05.)

American automakers have turned loose a few fleet cars over the years that run on this same E85 mix, but refueling stations have been few and far between in the Midwest and virtually nonexistent anywhere else. (Gasohol, which is more common, and which I sampled in western Minnesota last year, runs about 90 percent gasoline and 10 percent ethanol.) Given the fact that Saab is part of the GM organization — in fact, GM's Brazilian outpost, used to ethanol-based fuels by now, consulted on the Saab BioPower project — it's theoretically possible that this engine, or even this particular model, could end up Stateside, though there'd have to be a lot of them to justify opening up a bunch more E85 pumps. (Yes, it does run on ordinary gasoline, but someone paying $35k for a Saab is, I suspect, not going to tolerate the performance hit.)

Well, yes, you're supposed to put something in it. That's the whole idea.

My first place of my own (neither college dorm nor Army barracks counts) was a one-bedroom flat east of NW 23rd and MacArthur. And indeed a number of firsts took place therein, some of which are none of your beeswax, but I didn't stay there too awfully long: I had to learn how to undertake the responsibilities of Family Man, and they were too large to fit in the space available. It's still amusing to drive past there, though; the "distinctive" architecture is a hoot, and unlike most complexes in this neck of the woods, the name remains unchanged after all these years, even though a new management company has assumed command.

Finding something that hasn't changed in thirty years is obviously not impossible, but it's not the easiest thing to do either. Sometimes you're grateful for the change: the bar previously known as The Dirty Hoe has somehow mutated into Thirsty Mike's Sports Bar. Sometimes the change is demanded: Shogun Steak House of Japan (NW 118th and May) has an ad in the Sunday Oklahoman asserting that a similarly-named restaurant in Norman has no legal rights to the name. And sometimes I don't know what to think: the not-yet-opened Light at 57th eatery is now bearing a sign marked "Nancy's 57th Street Lighthouse," for which I claim no credit whatsoever.

I did pass by the old AT&T facility on Reno east of Council Road, which has been sitting empty for a scary length of time. There's a banner up promoting the warehouse as a distribution center, which makes sense, and another one pointing to a Web site devoted to the plant and the eventual sale thereof. To be honest, I can't see it going as a unit: I think they're going to have to subdivide it — the actual manufacturing facility alone is over 1.1 million square feet, nearly a third as large as the mammoth GM plant on the southeast side.

Which leads to another question: What happens when GM leaves town? (Which they will, almost certainly; despite having shed over 130,000 workers in the past 15 years, the General still has far too much excess capacity, and it's a safe bet that there won't be any concessions from the United Auto Workers between now and contract expiration in 2007.) My own personal belief is that GM as we know it is beyond the dinosaur stage and should be put out of its misery; any of the brands it owns which are worth keeping alive should be spun off. (Not so fast there, Buick.) After all, except for Saturn, they were all independent companies to begin with, and maintaining the current status quo as some sort of homage to Alfred Sloan and/or Billy Durant is no longer an option. And once GM is out of the picture, I'm betting, Oklahoma City Assembly will reopen, putting together Chevrolets — or Hyundais.

While pondering for the nth time my chronic datelessness, I happened upon the greatest personal ad of all time, and it wasn't even a personal. Technically, it was a help-wanted ad, but ... well, read it yourself. The headline was We Need a Girl!

God knows I could use a little duende around here.

Oh, this ad ran in auto magazines in early 1966, and this is the person selected by Hurst. She'd be about 62 today, and presumably would still meet most of these qualifications easily.

His name was Albert Fish, and his story ended in the electric chair at Sing Sing in 1936, a story filled with murder and perversion and cannibalism.

Inevitably, there is, or will be, Wisteria: The Story of Albert Fish, after Wisteria Cottage in Westchester County, New York, where Fish in 1928 killed a young girl and finished her off, probably not with fava beans and a nice Chianti. It's a pure New York story, so naturally it was filmed in central Oklahoma.

Most of the filming was done in and around Guthrie and Pawhuska; scenes requiring a New York City look were shot in Oklahoma City, where the old OPUBCO building at Fourth and Broadway, with a few minor tweaks, passed for the outside of a NYC police station (interior shots were done at the Guthrie Public Library). Local car clubs brought in vintage vehicles. This is not a huge production: budget is around $2 million, which is above shoestring, though not much.

Wisteria: The Albert Fish Story is produced by Wisteria Cottage Productions and is scheduled for release by Ravenwolf Films in 2006. (If you have QuickTime, you can see a teaser here.) The busy Patrick Bauchau stars.

Back in January, I linked to a Michael Bates complaint about the weakness of Tulsa's historic preservation ordinance.

It appears that things aren't much better in Big D, per this Dallas Observer story:

And what happens if you go to the Landmark Commission?

The experience of one property owner:

This isn't the sort of thing which encourages taking care of historic structures. Oklahoma City guidelines specify: "A [Certificate of Appropriateness] is not necessary for routine maintenance work, which includes repair or replacement when there is no change in design, materials, color in certain instances, or general appearance. A CA must be obtained for all other projects that affect the exterior surfaces or spaces of properties in the historic districts." This is not to say that it's particularly easy to do things in Oklahoma City, only that there are fewer potential legal hoops through which a property owner may have to jump.

Dallas' rep as a place where you tear everything down and start over again is somewhat undeserved. But it's pretty clear that when tearing something down is the path of least resistance, the bulldozers will be busy.

Now here's a scenario just waiting for a story to be told:

In short, exactly the sort of place you'd find Peter Keller, young, ambitious lawyer, with a good job, a fiancée from one of the better families, and utterly devoted to that "well-behaved traditionalism" — until one day he wanders into a coffeehouse and gets the first hint that what he really wants is something entirely different:

And so it was that Peter Keller decided that he did not accept the status quo, and resolved to go his own way, a way which, he found out quickly enough, would require him to give up everything he knew and start off in directions not only unfamiliar but perhaps even unheard of.

This is Vienna Days by Kim du Toit, a novel which examines the unraveling of one man against the backdrop of the unraveling of the old order in Vienna, the artistic movement known as Secessionism. It's not an unfamiliar story — we've all seen people seduced by the Quest before — but it's a story that unfolds at exactly the right speed and asks all the right questions, some of which are even answered. Du Toit's writing style is spare and precise: scarcely a word is wasted. It's appropriate, I think, for the story of a man who spent the first part of his life learning to think linearly, and the rest of it trying to find some reason not to.

Du Toit says he's selling about one copy of Vienna Days every day. I hope this piece stimulates at least a week's worth.

It appeals to my forgiving nature (yeah, right), this cancellation of Third World debt business, but it still leaves me somewhat queasy, and Lemuel knows why:

And then there's the case of countries who currently have corrupt irresponsible dictators; forgiving their debt will simply increase the cash flow for the favored few with no benefit to the general public. This should be perfectly obvious to anyone who isn't a rock star.

Personally, I think it's time we foreclosed on some of these hellholes. First person who shouts "Colonialism!" gets to send his next two paychecks to Robert Mugabe as a gesture of support for thuggery masquerading as government.

Last month I wrote about a new semi-risqué calendar intended to draw attention to the growing pension crisis, or something like that.

I have now received a copy of said calendar, and here's the explanation on the back:

And from whom are you getting this worthwhile advice?

Nor does it hurt that they are, um, scantily clad on the twelve pages of this 2006 calendar. These aren't your airbrushed beauties from your lad mags, and some of them have rolled up quite a few miles, but what the hell; at least it makes more sense than bicycling nude to protest oil consumption, which strikes me as downright painful.

You can order this for yourself at StewsStripped.com. It's $14.95 plus a buck and a quarter for shipping, and they're definitely undercharging for the shipping: mine came Priority Mail, which runs $3.85 or so.

Or something like that; last night's eruption of thunderstorms was far more reminiscent of early April than of mid-June, and just about everyone got an inch of rain for their trouble. Surprisingly, no tornado showed up, but 90-mph straight-line winds can do enough damage, thank you very much, and five TV stations had their hands full juggling on-screen graphics and live reports from people who for some reason enjoy watching these things close up and personal. (I don't have the temperament to be a storm spotter, I suppose.)

It's apparently still possible to hear Randy and the Rainbows on Philadelphia radio.

Steve H. lists ten artists even more suitable for torturing enemy combatants than Christina Aguilera.

And one day, when he rules the world:

Then again, even now wise parents will take their children to see B. B. King.

(Disclosure: I actually like Prince, or at least I did before he decided he wanted to be named after a melted household utensil. Maybe I have greater-than-average tolerance for horny five-foot-two-inch androgynous badasses.)

Now do us all a favor and beat it, wouldja please?

(Details here.)

At least, I hope so. About half the fence is now up; one section that had not been secured actually fell down during last night's storms. (Winds of 70 mph and more can do that, even if they're not spinning around in a circle.) The rains resulted in rather a lot of unwanted gullies being cut, but there's very little that can be done about that, inasmuch as there's no actual vegetation just now to hold the soil in place.

Tomorrow should be sunny, and maybe they'll be finished.

From this very site in August 2003:

The application is in, and it's even lowlier than I thought: the request is for 1,000 watts at 244 meters, about the same stick height as they have now. They're still short-spaced to KQOB (at 96.9; KWEY's application is for its existing 97.3 frequency) by about nine miles, though. (Translation: They don't meet the usual FCC spacing requirements for stations this close together on the dial, and must demonstrate to the Commission's satisfaction that there will be no excessive interference.