San Francisco journalist Rose Aguilar interviews Clara Luper.

You really should read the whole thing — Luper is one of the three or four most important people in the American civil-rights movement, ever — but I wanted to pass on a couple of bits.

Here, Aguilar asks, "What's the climate like today? I notice that when I go to churches, they're either all-white or all-black."

It's damned hard to hate someone who helped keep you alive.

And one more:

Wouldn't be the first time.

We've come a long way from the days when we set the miserable standard for Jim Crow, but there's still a way to go.

Thank you, Ms Aguilar, and thank you, Ms Luper.

And thanks to J. M. Branum, who passed on the link; he and Dr Kurt Hochenauer of Okie Funk were also interviewed.

Back in the days when entire pages of the daily newspaper were given over to Statements of Condition published as advertising by local banks, I used to see this particular proclamation (paraphrased slightly due to failing memory) in small print:

This was the tagline at Central National Bank, which began as a Depression-era Morris Plan office, making small loans to individuals and businesses outside the usual banking channels, and eventually becoming big enough to seek a bank charter of its own.

And while Central never rivaled the downtown Big Two, First National and Liberty, in assets, it had more account-holders than either: its focus on smaller accounts attracted people and businesses who thought they would get the back of the corporate hand from the tower-dwellers.

The bank continued to grow, and eventually it spawned a corporate cousin (branches were illegal in those days, and never mind the reproductive process) with the unwieldy name "Friendly National Bank in Southwest Oklahoma City," on the new Southwest Expressway (I-240) at Pennsylvania. Eventually Central wearied of downtown and set up an ultra-modern (for its time) facility at 6th and Classen.

When the banking laws were loosened, Central and Friendly were takeover targets, and eventually they fell into the hands of then-Ohio-based Bank One — before the acquisition of downtown giant Liberty. And once Bank One took over Liberty's tower space, offices deemed superfluous, including 6th and Classen, 37th and May, and the 23rd and Classen Gold Dome (which Liberty had acquired with the original Citizens National Bank) were shed.

Bank One itself, of course, eventually was taken over, by J. P. Morgan Chase. But I remember getting something of a twinge when I visited a one-time Friendly facility on the southside and shoving my Chase card into the same slot which used to accommodate Central's infamous mid-1980s That ("Twenty-four Hour Automatic Teller") Card.

Contrary to the impression you may have gotten here, it's not mine: I have greater autonomy than one might expect this low on the corporate ladder, and over the years I've gone from grievously underpaid to merely embarrassingly underpaid.

No, there are far worse jobs than mine, though I'd hesitate to speculate as to whether it's worse to practice proctology or to administer pedicures. (The doctor, at least, is presumably paid better.)

Dean Esmay has a thread going for naming that tenth planet beyond the orbit of Pluto.

Feel free to recommend a name in Comments. I am mentioning a few here in the hopes that I won't see them again:

• Britneya
  
• Tendentious
  
• ReaganWorld
  
• Alderaan
  
• Blogistan
  
• Googlewhack
  
• Smallworldafterall
  
• Robert C. Byrd
  
• Earth II (or, worse, "Earth ][")
  
• Crustbury
  

Your turn.

You're probably not planning a visit to Desert Hot Springs, California in August — if you're anything like me, avoiding the heat is a higher priority than frolicking in the, um, whatever it is they have in the desert [that would be "sand"-ed.] — but the Hacienda Hot Springs Inn will meet you halfway, at least five days a week.

The weekend rate at the end, per night, is whatever the temperature is, in degrees Fahrenheit, at 2 pm that day; if it's 110 degrees, your room is $110, plus the usual taxes and such. But to entice people to come in on weekdays, the inn takes that same temperature and slices it in half: fifty-five bucks on that 110-degree day.

On the downside, grumbles Gridskipper, "you'll need every extra penny to buy enough fluids to stay hydrated."

Senator Jesse Helms, commenting on the Senate's decision not to ratify the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, circa 1999:

For those who have wondered if I ever do a post just to bait someone, the answer is one of the following:

1. Yes.
   
2. Yep.
   
3. You betcha.
   

Sometimes I even link back to the someone in question.

The National Rifle Association has called for a national boycott of ConocoPhillips retailers, and will support it with a media campaign.

NRA Executive Vice President Wayne LaPierre announced the boycott in Idabel, Oklahoma today, at a rally for a dozen Weyerhaeuser workers who were sacked last year for having firearms in their vehicles in the paper mill's parking lot. The Oklahoma Legislature quickly passed a measure to prevent employers from firing workers for this reason; major state employers, backed by the State Chamber of Commerce, sued to block implementation of the measure, prompting the Legislature to pass a second bill which would protect employers from civil liability should firearms be stolen from their owners on the premises. With Whirlpool Corporation having withdrawn from the lawsuit, the largest firm remaining in the litigation is ConocoPhillips.

Which leads to the most obvious question: Does an individual's Second Amendment right trump an individual or corporation's right to determine what can and cannot be brought onto private property? In view of the Supreme Court's decision that "private" property really isn't, I'm left with the Second Amendment, which remains in effect.

(Disclosure: Your humble scribe is an NRA member; the organization did not request that I comment on this issue.)

Addendum, 11:30 am, 4 August: The Mad Okie sees it differently:

Does your podcast stink? According to Costa, it might be the way you sound:

Not that he thinks he's some kind of role model for the rest of us:

It would take more than a "tune-up" to help some of us.

On the other hand, or ear, I could probably listen to Julie Neidlinger all day: her delivery is not the slickest in the world, but she doesn't grate, which is surely worth something.

What else could it be?

One fortunate man, and one extraordinary woman. Of such are legends made.

(No, I don't meet the qualifications, but thank you for asking.)

A quarter-million dollar updating of Balliet's at 50 Penn Place prompted these observations from Mayor Cornett:

It's not that outdated, sir; the 250 large Balliet's is putting into its store is roughly equivalent to a slow week at Wal-Mart.

Still, if we're going to have this upscale stuff, and lots of folks (including myself, I admit it) are hoping that we are, we do have to make those investments.

Cornett continues:

Patience, good fellow. And it would help if we could get some higher salaries around here so we could afford to shop at Neiman's. (Macy's, of course, will be here shortly, the result of the Federated/May merger; the existing Foley's stores will be rebranded.)

One could argue, I suppose, that high-end retail and services are the very definition of self-indulgence. But entire industries, including the one in which I toil, are built on self-indulgence: the ascetic may have his philosophical points, but he doesn't bring in any revenue.

A startling prediction from Francis W. Porretto:

I think his projected outcome is correct, but how he gets there is definitely arguable. For one thing, women, I suspect, are more likely to be found in the anti-abortion ranks. Dean Esmay reports:

And men, of course, could be said to have a vested interest in preserving the availability of abortion, especially if they hope to sow mass quantities of wild oats. If anything, this would propel women to select for more boys.

What's going to decimate the ranks of males, more likely, will be the very factors FWP mentions elsewhere in his article:

(Incidentally, if there's a magnetic ribbon promoting prostate-cancer research, I don't want to see it.)

And already, in the county in which I live, there are 82 single men for every 100 single women. Similar figures prevail in FWP's neck of the suburban woods. (Methodology here.) I have no reason to think the ratio will approach 1:1 by 2025.

Last summer, a judge in New Jersey authorized a sea captain to carry a concealed firearm, noting that large oceangoing vessels — Salvatore Atanasio Jr. commands cruise ships off the Jersey shore — might be targeted by terrorists, and the Coast Guard might be up to an hour away.

A state appeals panel has now withdrawn the captain's permit, asserting that concern about terrorism is insufficient justification for carrying a gun:

"Oh, the humanity!" is the cry from Ravenwood's Universe:

It may simply be that Trenton can't figure out how to extort the requisite amount of graft for something so simple as a concealed-carry permit.

One of the Two-Headed at LOOK@OKC (neither one of them signed it, curiously) proposes an actual Oklahoma City flash mob.

Seriously:

If the sheer randomness of it, or something else, appeals to you, by all means tell them so.

(Off in the distance, I can almost hear Darryl Starbird: "BE THERE!")

Behold the power of cheese.

(Courtesy of Tinkerty Tonk.)

Linksys apparently has a new driver for my Wi-Fi adapter (dated 28 July, and you can't get much newer than that), so I'm downloading all 33 mb of that little jewel and will try once more to reinstall that card and get it to work.

If it fails this time, I think I'm going to seek out a competitor's card. (Don't wait up for the results; I'm not doing this right away, but I wanted to post a reminder so I don't forget about it somewhere down the road.)

Michelle Malkin sizes up Muslim commentator Fatina Abdrabboh:

The record-holder in this realm, though, remains Cam Edwards, who once described a leading Democrat this way:

Snark and product placement. What's not to love?

You'd be hard-pressed to find anyone who calls it that, but a 2.5-mile stretch of Tulsa's Inner Dispersal Loop, despite a lack of signage to that effect, is technically Interstate 444.

I thought of this when I was running around the I-44/235 interchange, and noted that the 235 designation ends at this point: the Broadway Extension northward is signed simply as US 77. Could this be another "hidden" interstate? No; I-235 does not extend north of I-44.

But I found, while getting corroboration for this fact, that the city's entry in Wikipedia describes the Lake Hefner Parkway, otherwise Oklahoma 74, as "Interstate 644." This is plausible, I suppose, but I have no idea where this came from.

The big news downtown today is the release of a new Downtown Housing Study, which says that demand remains strong, but that the danger of saturation lurks in the wings.

What would get people to move downtown?

Who's downtown already?

This 43-percent post-graduate figure surprised me; it's about 4.5 times the national average. I attribute this to the fact that there really isn't any low-cost housing in our downtown core.

But what's really amazing is that only 18 percent of downtown residents actually work downtown. They're downtown because they want to be, not because it's convenient or because it might save them some commuting costs. This is a mindset I can understand, even embrace. On the other hand, I don't have a quarter-million I can drop on one of the new townhouses in the Triangle.

Yesterday's primary election in Detroit weeded the City Council hopefuls to eighteen; nine will be elected this November. Finishing ninth in the primary: Martha Reeves.

Yes, that Martha Reeves. And she's ready to go to work:

Reeves owns a number of old buildings in the city which she'd like to restore: one of her priorities on the council, she says, will be improving police protection to the point that old buildings can be restored, instead of falling victim to vandals and scavengers.

And no doubt her much-maligned home town is ready for a brand new beat.

Matt Deatherage was talking about Ohio's 2nd District, but this would seem to apply equally well elsewhere in American politics:

It might be possible to quibble about the precise numbers, but the mechanics are exactly as described.

Which is technically inaccurate, since the Carnival of the Vanities is only 150 weeks old, not 150 years.

Still, Internet time seems accelerated to me, and probably to you, which means you ought to hurry to Riding Sun for that 150th edition and get your week's worth of superior bloggage at one fell swoop. Tell them a sesquipedalian sent you.

Patti Ratliff writes to the Oklahoma Gazette:

And you know, if the Gazette balks at this, it's a golden opportunity for LOOK@OKC, which definitely needs to build some buzz if they're going to be the alternative alternative paper.

Either way, I'd love to see the ballot.

Actually, kittens aren't in much danger these days, except in the purely Farkular sense, but inasmuch as the Department of Defense, under the No Child Left Behind Act, is granted access to student records for the purpose of military recruiting, parents with a distaste for all things military might worry about their children — and, truth be told, even some hawkish types like myself get annoyed at this sort of governmental high-handedness.

Anyway, starting 7 September (two days after Labor Day), a group called Leave My Child Alone will push for greater awareness of this not-especially-well-publicized law, and will explain how, under the provisions of NCLB, you can opt out of the Pentagon's database and your individual school's recruitment lists. (Not simultaneously: these are two separate operations.) You can jump the gun, so to speak, by going here.

(By way of the Barista of Bloomfield Ave.)

Fritz Kiersch took a few years off from directing to become professor of film and video at Oklahoma City Community College, but he's back on the set once again, and this time the set is downtown Oklahoma City.

Surveillance, starring Armand Assante, is the story of a security guard with a sackful of secrets. About half the film crew was drawn from OKCC's film/video students.

This is Kiersch's second film this year: The Hunt has just completed post-production and is scheduled for released in 2006. Gray Frederickson's Graymark Productions and distributor Image Entertainment produced both films.

Dear Sir or Madam:

An extremely nice writeup on [fill in subject]. In fact, I thought it was nice when I wrote it on [fill in date].

[Link to original]

Thanks for reading....

(This has always worked for me. Your mileage may vary.)

I'd seen a few Valero stations during this year's World Tour — even filled up at one, in central Connecticut — but I really wasn't expecting to find one at NE 63rd and Kelley today.

Turns out Valero is converting all the Diamond Shamrock stations:

Valero had purchased Ultramar Diamond Shamrock Corporation back in 2001 for about $4 billion, but this is the first step I've seen toward rebranding. Their acquisition of Premcor this spring gave Valero the largest group of refineries in the nation, surpassing even ExxonMobil, so I rather expect they won't be running short of gasoline any time soon.

Yonder cometh the 2005 Okie Blog Awards, put together by Mike at Okiedoke and intended to — well, duh, it's an awards scheme, okay?

Here are the ground rules:

I, of course, make no recommendations, since (1) I would like to create the illusion that I have no bias and (2) most of my readers seem to live in New Jersey. These, however, are the categories:

• Best Overall Blog
  
• Best Political Blog
  
• Best Family Blog
  
• Best Humor Blog
  
• Best Audio Blog
  
• Best Blog Layout
  
• Best Unusual Blog
  
• Best Writing Blog
  
• Best Culture Blog
  
• Best Inspirational Blog
  
• Best Commercial Blog (company sponsored)
  

At least there's nothing there that sounds like me.

I'll just bet it's getting easier to smile every day.

(It has to be tremendously gratifying to see all her friends, even the ones she didn't know, putting their money where her mouth is.)

On the off-chance that some of you are curious, this is the shorter of the two chaste trees in my back yard, shot back in June when it was somewhere close to full bloom. (The enormous one, described in the original post, was substantially taller but quite a bit less colorful for some reason; I assume it's not because it's closer to the gas meter.) As you can see, I prune only under duress. (If you want a better look, here's a bigger picture.)

How many of you know someone who never goes down to Bricktown because "you have to park so far away"?

That's what I thought.

Show 'em this.

(Which was prompted by this.)

Which puts me at odds with Nick Lowe, but so it goes.

Anyway, it appears that I'm going to be needing to replace the windshield on my car; there's a new crack at a right angle to the old crack, and I expect all manner of vectors to develop in the next few days. If you have any reason to recommend (or to castigate) any glass vendors, local or national, I'd be interested in hearing about it.

Speaking of things broken, water pressure was way low when I got home yesterday, though it was back to normal about an hour later. This morning's commute provided a hint: there had apparently been some water-main work in the 2600 block of NW 50th. And, well, summers being dry around these parts, mud represents a change of pace, if not exactly a welcome one.

Mike at Okiedoke is alarmed by statistics which show that nearly 83 percent of students in the Oklahoma City school district qualify for free or reduced-price lunches. (The comparable figure for the larger Tulsa district is 78 percent.)

This might be less alarming in the context of where the Oklahoma City school district actually is: right in the middle of town, with an arm extending into relatively poor areas in the northeastern part of Oklahoma County. Much of the city proper is actually served by suburban districts: Putnam City, Edmond, Moore, Mid-Del, Western Heights, and 18 others.

Superintendent Bob Moore doesn't seem to be perturbed:

Monroe, incidentally, is right down the street (two blocks) from me. It's not a poor area by any means — we're talking less than a mile west of 50 Penn Place — but still 57 percent of the students qualify for the lunch program.

Mike thinks this is a sign that the economy isn't all it could be, and of course it isn't, but it's not a sign that we're on the edge of collapse.

Wonkette hints at being reality-based:

And apparently he puts in enough hours to qualify as "full-time."

I'm still trying to imagine the voicemail, though:

• Press 1 to hear the President's latest cholesterol and BMI figures.

• Press 2 to hear the response to [fill in latest media outburst from Islam Inflamed].

• Press 3 to register an Up vote on John Roberts.

• Press 4#*&@% to register a Down vote on John Roberts.

• Press 5 to request a photo of the President's thumb.

• Press 666 to speak to Karl Rove.
  

Everything else will just have to wait.

Or a river forded, depending on how you want to look at it.

I couldn't see it at all: the rain had suddenly increased from "rapid" to "very fast indeed" to "Did they evacuate the zoo?" I'm in the left lane of I-44, doing a ridiculously speedy 50 mph, which under the circumstances is hazardous in the extreme, but there's this dork in an Expedition who appparently wants to ride my back bumper in the worst way.

And then the Really Large Impromptu Lake appears, straddling a lane and a half, and the miracle of hydroplaning sends me veering off course 15 degrees or so — not that I can tell, because visibility beyond the windshield (which now is clean, if still cracked) is down in the couple-of-centimeters range. It takes me about 1.5 seconds to regain control and discover I'm heading for nowhere good. Meanwhile, the aforementioned dork has actually sped up and is now within biting distance of the trunk lid.

Meanwhile, traffic is merging, and having had one prayer answered, I decide not to utter the curse that's going through the back of my mind. I wish, though, that people would get it through their heads that having a sport-utility vehicle does not confer any sort of invulnerability to the slings and arrows of outrageous traffic. If anything, the SUVs are worse off, being tall and tippy devices in the first place, and seven times out of ten they're driven by people who think the laws of physics are nothing more than a blanket excuse from Montgomery Scott.

I take solace in the likelihood that one shiny new Expedition will need ten grand worth of bodywork in the upcoming months as its owner reaches his level of incompetence.

About a year ago, I wrote about Bill Moss, in his capacity as a small-time record executive in Columbus, Ohio who had issued, on his own Capsoul label, some of the more transcendent (if largely unknown outside the Midwest) soul records of the early 1970s.

Moss went from the music business into politics. As I had noted, he had served on the Columbus school board; as I had not noted, his tenure was controversial and his demeanor was fierce. His dedication to the children of the city, though, was unquestioned.

Upon Moss' death earlier this week, Columbus writer Donna Marbury put together a set of Web articles about the man, including mine — "so that he is not typecast just as a tyrannical hothead, but as a musician, journalist, activist, lover and a fighter."

As epitaphs go, that's a pretty good one.

Big neighborhood meeting Monday evening for residents of Crown Heights, Douglas Park, Edgemere Heights, Edgemere Park and Zachary Taylor neigborhoods, at First Christian Church, 36th and Walker.

The topic: the redesign of the 36th and Broadway Extension interchange. ODOT is pitching the idea that the widening of the Broadway Extension and the conversion of the offramps from one-lane loops to two-lane straight routes will cut down on surface traffic through the neighborhoods. The project will start this fall.

(Brief thought: Do you think I could raise any money by promising not to post anything for a whole day?)

I'm signed on as sponsors for the following:

• The Fire Ant Gazette, Eric Siegmund (for Midland [Texas] Fair Havens)

• Lone Prairie Blog, Julie R. Neidlinger (for Angel Tree)
  

Tomorrow I write checks.

(Update, Sunday: Checks written.)

I'm not even sure I can excerpt this, but let's see:

And that's just what it does to the woman.

It gets better, or worse:

Let's focus on that line about "The guys and I do not even hire single mothers because of the problems." What was the official response by Ebert's attorney to the lawsuit? You guessed it:

Except, of course, when there might be "problems."

Aldahlia cites this case as "The Crossroads of Conservatism," and asks:

This balancing act would baffle Cirque de Soleil.

Someone was kind enough to send word of World Naked Gardening Day, and I'm happy to pass it along, but I am compelled to point out that for all its presumed joys, there are distinct disadvantages to doing this sort of thing:

• "Hmmm. I wonder if that could have been poison oak."
  
• Entirely too many tools with big, sharp blades.
  
• "Now we'll just pull this back away from the fence, and — oh, hi, Mrs Grabarkewitz."
  
• Police helicopters.
  
• "I thought I trimmed that rosebush already."
  
• Sunscreen and Miracle-Gro don't mix.
  
• "Those damn bugs get into everything."
  
• String trimmers.
  

Trust me on most of these.

I was gearing up to do a memorial piece for Blues Hall of Fame member Little Milton, who died Thursday at the age of seventy, but Matt Rosenberg has already done a better one, so I'll point you to it instead.

In passing, I'll note that one of Milton's sidemen — er, sidepersons — in the late 1950s was pianist Fontella Bass; as the story goes, Milton was running late for a gig one night and bandleader Oliver Sain asked her to do a vocal to fill time. It went well enough to get Bass a featured-vocal spot each night, and eventually she and Sain struck out on their own, the result being the sublime "Rescue Me" in 1965.

And 1965 was also the year of Milton's biggest chart hit, "We're Gonna Make It", which was a little more pop than most of Milton's records — indeed, a little more pop than most of what Chess was releasing those days — but which always jumps out at you on those infrequent instances when you hear it on the radio.

With this month's bill (which, owing to an overpayment last month, comes to something less than zero), Oklahoma Natural Gas sent out a letter explaining the new rate structure for residential customers — or structures, inasmuch as there are now two residential rate schedules.

Some things aren't being refigured: the cost of the actual gas (now identified as "Customer Fuel Cost") and various fees and taxes remain as they were. The Customer Charge and Delivery Fee have been reworked, though: now "low-use" customers ("low-use" being defined as "less than 75 dekatherms," which is almost but not exactly 75,000 cubic feet of gas, per year) will pay a $9 monthly Service Charge and a Delivery Fee of $1.9967/Dth. This is Plan A. Everyone else gets Plan B, which has a $20 Service Charge but a lower Delivery Fee — 23.67 cents/Dth.

Based on last year's usage here at Surlywood, which was a mere 56.6 Dth, ONG has assigned me to Plan A, and estimates that while Plan A tends to result in higher bills in the winter, what with the higher Delivery Fee and all, it's $34 less expensive for the entire year than Plan B. (My winter usage runs 8 to 10 Dth per month; in the summer, it's less than 1.) I have the option of switching to Plan B if I so desire, though customers are allowed only one switch per year, for reasons which should be obvious.

Also, my bank informs me that in the future, online payments will be limited to a maximum of $100,000 on any single business day. Somehow I don't envision this being a problem.

T. K. Wetherell, president of Florida State University, says he will sue the National Collegiate Athletic Association for its decision to ban Native American-related team indicia and mascots and whatnot at schools hosting NCAA postseason events.

Says Wetherell:

What's more, he says, he's contemplating painting the Seminole logo "three times as big" on the Doak Campbell Stadium field.

The actual Seminole tribe was not consulted by the NCAA, says Tribal Council member Max B. Osceola Jr.:

(Emphasis added.)

The NCAA ruling apparently does not affect football, since there is no actual NCAA championship series. Meanwhile, I'm waiting for someone to complain about Michael Savage's last name.

It's still a bit bare down there, but things are taking shape along SE 29th Street where Atkinson Plaza used to be: Lowe's is ready, Target is almost done, and Kohl's is hiring. A Chili's is going up next door to the existing Santa Fe Cattle Co. steakhouse. The street itself has been widened to five lanes, and there's a turn-in with a light at Marshall Drive to reach the major stores from the east. (From the west, you come in at Boeing.)

At the far end, at Midwest Boulevard, the condemned Nissan dealership location is now being used by the Sheriff's office; the parking lot is full of squad cars. Fenton, which acquired Automax Nissan on NW 39th some months back, now has a Nissan store on the Tinker Diagonal, east of Automax's Hyundai lot.

Not a whole lot has changed at Heritage Park, though I noticed that someone had drawn some chalk lines around the more horrendous potholes, which perhaps means that they're actually going to be scheduled for repair.

A subdivision called Southern Exposure is going in at SW 89th and Walker, and lots are for sale, subject to the condition that any house you build be 2400 square feet or more. This is not unusual — I've heard of covenants requiring 3000 and more in various northwest subdivisions — but inasmuch as this is about twice the size of any place I've ever lived, and there were seven of us, I have to assume that people are willing to pay out the nose for the privilege of having more space to clean.

And Russell Stover, the candy firm with a retail store on Northwest Expressway east of May, is putting in an outlet store around the corner, on May near NW 56th, in a building last occupied by an independent auto dealer and which looks to me like it started out as a Kinney shoe store.

Usually, church advertising in local newspapers is simple: there's generally a weekly "Worship Services Directory" or something like that, and various congregations put up a few bucks for a business-card-sized block. Once in a while, a church will buy a page for something out of the ordinary — a revival, say, or to take a stand for or against something — but by and large, it tends to be a low-key sort of thing.

This morning's Oklahoman, though, contains an oddity: a sixth of a page — about the same size as the bank ad below it — bought by the Archdiocese of Oklahoma City, and tagged "Ever Thought Of Becoming Catholic?"

This is the letter from Archbishop Eusebius J. Beltran:

There follows a list of six local parishes; there are many more than that in the city, which suggests either that this ad is customized by location (more likely, since all six are north of the river) or that these six are particularly anxious for new parishioners.

Times do change.

Dawn Eden interviews James Lileks.

Life is good.

Maurice Kanbar has an impressive résumé. He owns three dozen patents on various consumer and medical products — among other things, he invented the D-Fuzz-It comb for sweaters and a plastic shield for hypodermic needles — and he is the founder of Skyy Spirits, which vends America's #2 brand of premium vodka.

And now he owns half of downtown Tulsa. Well, okay, not half; but he did buy six downtown buildings at one fell swoop, including the gorgeous 1929 PSO building at 6th and Main and the 1931 Pythian Building at 5th and Boulder. Tulsa is on the verge of a renaissance, thinks Kanbar, and he wants to be part of it.

Preservationists have had a tough time of it in Tulsa lately; with Kanbar apparently on their side, the balance of power could well tip in their favor. And about time, say I.

"Wait a minute. This oven cleans itself?"

I hate to go to the mall, generally: part of this dislike is sheer laziness, and part of it is the nagging of the conscience, budget division, along the lines of "Do you really need this?" There's even some anxiety in the mix. But a growing factor is the increasing tendency of stores to throw gee-whiz stuff at you that does not in any way enhance the shopping experience, as Andrea Harris explains:

Not to mention the tendency in individual stores to stack unshelved items at the end of the aisle, thereby creating a blind spot the size of a grocery cart, and the now-firmly-established ratio of 2.4 checkout lanes for each actual checkout clerk.

If Amazon.com could deliver fresh vegetables — but let's not get our hopes up.

This piece from last summer has been getting a lot of traffic this weekend; it took a few minutes to round up the usual linkage, but Myron Tereshschuk is newsworthy again:

I suppose that somewhere in the back of my mind, I wondered whatever happened to him.

He's back, he's sort of rested, and he's ready to Explain It All:

There are fewer stray forklifts, but otherwise I think it's settled.

There is a special place in hell reserved for those who are both self-righteous and opportunistic, who see the most solemn moments as excuses for pushing the product.

Peter Jennings wasn't even cold yet when this hit Michelle Malkin's mailbox:

Elapsed time between ABC's announcement of Jennings' death and Banzhaf's grab for the spotlight: less than fifteen minutes.

What a farging ghoul. Anybody got a Marlboro?

(Addendum, 8:45 am: NPR is reporting that ABC's first mention of Jennings' death was broadcast over the television network around 11:30 pm, half an hour before it hit abcnews.com, which could have given Banzhaf a whole forty-five minutes to pull this script out of the can.)

(Submitted to the Beltway Traffic Jam.)

Kerr-McGee is selling off its North Sea oil operations, suggesting that the Oklahoma City-based company is planning to restructure itself as purely a domestic producer.

Most of the KMG holdings will be sold to the A.P. Moller-Maersk group of Denmark, with the rest dealt to England's Centrica PLC. The total take is estimated at $3.5 billion; KMG will use the after-tax proceeds to pay down debt.

(No, that's not a deposition by Michael Jackson.)

Ann Althouse is looking for the quintessential bubblegum-pop tune.

And I'd like to get in a plug for a personal, if hardly definitive, favorite: "May I Take a Giant Step (Into Your Heart)," the follow-up to "Simon Says" by the 1910 Fruitgum Company, which is more fun than its predecessor — and faster, too!

The husband of Terri Schiavo was honored by a group that advocates guardianship services for his years-long efforts to get his wife's feeding tube disconnected.

It was a "controversial choice," said the Florida State Guardianship Association, but they wished to honor his commitment to his wife's reported (by him) request.

Still no word on a posthumous Nobel Peace Prize for Timothy McVeigh.

(From NRO's The Corner.)

Lynn has some definite preferences regarding Web design:

I'm pretty much in agreement on most of these, though obviously I don't put them into practice. Light lettering on a dark background can be done, but I think it requires bumping up the font size to avoid eyestrain. (Probably not this big, though.)

The original template I used when I shifted to Movable Type in the summer of 2003 called for serif fonts (justified, yet!) for text and sans-serif fonts for headings. My present-day style is not quite so consistent.

But is a serif font more "formal" or "serious"? In the context of actual print, I think it is, and I'd have my doubts about a textbook set in a sans-serif font. (My personal correspondence — yes, I occasionally write, or at least type, letters — uses a serif font for the body and for the block with my name; the address information is in a smaller sans-serif font.) I'm not so sure it matters so much on screen, though.

And this is sort of interesting: Car and Driver magazine these days uses a serif font for road tests, but previews are done in sans-serif. Do you think people were having trouble telling them apart?

Top Ten signs that terrorists have infiltrated the blogosphere:

And the Number One sign terrorists have infiltrated the blogosphere:

(From BlogHerald by way of Fistful of Fortnights.)

James Woods, interviewed by Brantley Bardin in the September issue of Premiere:

Jimmy, Jimmy, Jimmy. Listen to yourself. Why, Hamlet is nothing more than an apologia for domestic violence. (Poor Ophelia is driven to suicide, and it's all Hamlet's fault for being such an asshole. Villain, even.) And don't even mention the Apollo program. Do you realize how much that cost? Imagine all the school lunches we could have bought, all the endangered species we could have saved.

[Geez, this is easy.]

In this month's Neighborhood Association newsletter, the address of the meeting location was printed incorrectly.

Turnout was about 50 percent higher than usual.

Next month, I'm going to suggest they put in the wrong date.

Andrea Harris has seen plenty of it:

I have seen places where it happens, so I know that the situation exists. But I don't have this particular issue myself, except perhaps in vestigial form: how I view someone's work is separate, to the greatest extent possible, from how I view someone's personal behavior. (I can't claim to be, say, one of Heinlein's Fair Witnesses, but I try to keep personal feelings out of it.)

Then again, the number of "pretty women at the office" who flirt with me has been stuck right around zero for many years now, which may affect my judgment in these matters in one way or another.

This morning I betook myself to Glass Masters and threw myself on their mercy.

In approximately 60 minutes they had removed the old, cracked windshield, installed a new one, and imparted the usual advice about early care (keep a window slightly open when you close the doors, and stay out of the car wash for 48 hours).

For a mere $140.

Time will tell how long this holds up, but for now, I'm quite pleased. (And, if nothing else, this proves that I listen to my commenters once in a while.)

The story goes — at least, Lewis Black tells it that way — that the world will end when there's a Starbucks built across the street from another Starbucks.

It didn't happen, but for some it's close enough; for Deanna Zandt, the world ends when Starbucks comes to the Lower East Side of Manhattan:

I still think, though, that the ultimate in Starbucks density — and perhaps the end of the world — will come when they open a Starbucks inside another Starbucks.

(Via Gridskipper.)

Me, last December:

For instance:

Bricktown extends to maybe Reno and Lincoln; we're talking the 600 block at the absolute outside. And 3701 isn't even in the city limits, fercrissake; it's in Del City.

At least they didn't hang a Bricktown name on it.

(Spotted by The Downtown Guy.)

Or, in Farkese, here comes the science.

University of Salford graduate student Amanda Griffiths is doing her doctoral thesis on the fine art of the air guitar, and why there seem to be gender differences in the playing thereof.

Griffiths' work will be overseen by Sheila Whiteley, Salford's Professor of Popular Music.

I must admit to a certain fondness for one of her subtitles: "Celebrating the fakeness of the inauthentic," which could almost be a motto for this Web site.

(Courtesy of Erin O'Connor.)

One of the things that "everybody knows" is that we have a horribly uneducated workforce in this town and therefore we don't earn much and our per capita income numbers look bad and therefore we get no outside investment and so on and so on and scooby-dooby-doo. (Bless you, Sly.)

Business Facilities magazine begs to disagree. Here's what they did:

Numero Uno, to no one's surprise, is Minneapolis. (One has to go to school to learn Minnesota Nice, after all.) But here's Oklahoma City tied for 18th in the nation. Who'da thunk it?

State Secretary of Commerce and Tourism Kathy Taylor, for one.

If you're an institutional buyer of prescription drugs and you'd like some serious discounts, be prepared to keep your trap shut:

"Is this hospital prescribing too much of this drug?" or "Could we find a lower-priced substitute?" is apparently enough to constitute negative D.U.R.

I'll keep this in mind the next time I see some drug-industry ad on Lifetime explaining how health is the only thing that matters to them.

(Via Lindsay Beyerstein.)

Diane Rehm seems to be having a rough time today. In the same burst of words, she managed to misidentify the transportation bill the President is signing today as an "energy" bill and referred to that woman who is hanging around outside the President's fence as "Cindy Crawford."

Given the location of said fence, I can sort of understand the confusion; I'd rather believe that Diane has the occasional brainfart than that she was overwhelmed by the blistering rhetoric and smoldering sexuality of guest Rick Santorum.

More rum than I know what to do with.

Generic Confusion hosts Carnival of the Vanities #151, which is more great bloggage than I know what to do with.

Go ye, and read.

Hmmm. This IP looks familiar.... yep, visitor #800,000 is yours truly, come to check on who visitor #800,000 might be.

We hit 750,000 on the 9th of June, so even if we're going nowhere, we're making pretty good time. (The 700,000 mark was reached in April.)

One million by the 10th anniversary (9 April 2006) now looks not only attainable but inevitable.

The spawn of a marriage of inconvenience, you may be sure: What if Richard Wagner and Britney Spears had a baby?

Me, I want to hear Kevin Federline try to pronounce Götterdämmerung.

Putting clothes on a dog is bad enough, but this is a bit much.

(By way of Aldahlia.)

And, of course, they're registered at Six Apart.

I'm not quite sure what to think of this, except to marvel at its ingenuity, and maybe to ponder the legalities, which go like this:

Full faith and credit, and all that good stuff.

Congratulations, Kathleen and Eric.

(Via incurable romantic Jacqueline Passey.)

You are wrong, moral-equivalence breath. Lileks explains:

Doesn't leave a lot of homegrown terrorists, though there will presumably always be wannabes.

Lynn's son goes looking for CNG-powered vehicles and comes away empty-handed:

We don't have a lot of vehicles that run on natural gas in this country, but a couple of popular models have CNG variants, and I've got to believe that if there were much of a waiting list, there'd be a lot more such on the drawing boards.

And at least CNG refueling stations are relatively easy to find, which is more than you can say for fairy dust.

Aldahlia and I were yakking it up last night, and one topic we covered was the incredibly wide variety of search-engine requests that show up in our logs, some of which qualify as unspeakable. (The sheer ingenuity of the world's perverts is something to behold.)

What to do with these things? I send my worst ones to Disturbing Search Requests, where blogdom assembled can mock them at their leisure. Traffic there has diminished of late, probably due to a change of hosts, and I'd be much obliged if you'd give them a look — if you can stand that sort of thing. Rather a large proportion of the entries are, as the phrase goes, Not Safe For Work.

Ann Coulter has made quite a career of outraging people, which is all very well and good, but has she gone too far this time?

Offending liberals is one thing, but insulting Trekkies? The world — their world, anyway — will judder on its axis.

Wonder what she thinks of the Ferengi?

Nobody said it was going to be easy for the Democrats in 2008, what with population shifts and gerrymandering and all manner of other obstacles standing athwart their Path to Power.

Dwayne has a suggestion: "Move."

Besides, we're a lot warmer than Canada.

(Update, 9:30 am, 12 August: Dwayne has numbers — and a name! — for the proposal.)

I dearly love the Bulwer-Lytton contest, but the entries too often have one glaring flaw besides mere suckiness: they're incredibly freaking long for a single sentence.

If terseness is more your bag, there is now a Lyttle Lytton contest, with basically the same rules plus a 25-word limit.

And something like this deserves some kind of recognition:

(Courtesy of Teresa Nielsen Hayden.)

Charlie Dreyling is out on $10,000 bail after being caught at Will Rogers World Airport with a crude detonation device in his bags. The chances of this being usable for anything beyond blowing crap up in one's back yard, a popular Oklahoma pastime, are next to nil, but people who ought to know better are arguing that we're talking terrorism here.

I have no doubt Dreyling is every bit as clueless as your average terrorist, but until someone comes up with some actual evidence, I'm going with the oft-proven Oklahoma adage:

What I can't fathom is the apparent hope that Dreyling is some sort of terrorist and therefore we can forget about all that horrible "profiling" business — as though one white guy trumps a whole sea of Muslims. How racist of them.

Or someone's sleeping in the Department of Titles and Screen Displays at ABC. Whatever the explanation, Matt Deatherage noticed this:

"Tonight" being last night, when he posted it.

Since ABC hasn't named a permanent replacement yet, maybe they're holding off in anticipation of the actual appointment. But it's going to sound awkward, maybe worse, until then.

Author Jennifer Weiner (In Her Shoes, Good in Bed) is retreating from blogdom for a few days:

Which triggers a question, which Caren Lissner has already asked:

Presumably it's not the Can-Can.

Lots of contenders this week, but this one raises the eyebrows to peak level. From Francis W. Porretto:

Don't I know it.

Don Danz told me Wednesday that I had made it to Blogrolling.com's Hot 500. For no reason I can imagine, it's Friday and I'm still there.

I'd like to thank those of you who added a few seconds to my 15 minutes of net.fame. (And I'd also like to know: what were you thinking?)

One of the defining characteristics of an Oklahoma thunderstorm is that it packs its biggest wallop into a compact size. When the Weather Guys say "locally heavy rainfall," they mean it; today's thunderboomers dropped a mere 0.04 inch of rain on parched Will Rogers Airport, while the cup at Wiley Post, across town and markedly closer to me, filled up with almost two-thirds of an inch.

With neither hail nor funnels, the major threat was industrial-strength winds, and as I rounded the corner to my street, I found the top of a tree — a little triangular section about a foot and a half across — parked in the right lane. Not a good sign, I thought. And beyond my driveway, on the corner lot belonging to an apartment complex, a formerly eight-foot-tall mutant shrub was bent over to a height of five feet, its trunk split to within a foot of the ground, its top actually scraping the grass.

A quick survey of my place revealed a few broken branches, none thicker than 1/8 inch. Maybe there's some actual advantage (other than flood resistance) to being on top of a slight rise.

The Metropolitan Library System is installing Wi-Fi hotspots at 12 of its locations in the county. The expense, they reason, will be largely offset by not having to buy so many actual computers in the future. The network will be open to library visitors whether they have a current library card or not, which will simplify matters for travelers.

The same filtration used on MLS' hard-wired machines will be used on the Wi-Fi network. MLS says the service will be rolled out at all twelve locations on Monday at 9 am.

"Sure, he used to be great and all that, but he became all rock star-ish and washed up, so why bother with him at all?"

Cliff defends Bruce Springsteen against charges like this.

(Via Lindsay Beyerstein.)

Richard Mize, Real Estate Editor (now there's a title) at The Oklahoman, has taken note of the growing tendency of firms nowhere near Bricktown to make use of the name, a tendency you may have read about here or even here.

Part of the problem, if problem it be, is that the definition of "Bricktown" is sort of murky. In the strictest sense, Bricktown is that area covered by the Bricktown Urban Design District zoning. But the city is redefining its zoning districts downtown, and I-40 is probably a more reasonable southern boundary anyway — until, of course, they move I-40 half a mile away.

And Mize wonders if "Bricktown" will become shorthand for the entire city, in the manner of "Motown" or "Tinseltown" or "Beantown." In a word: no.

Why are so many young adult men still living with the parental units? Forget economic pressures, overpriced rentals, and all the other obvious factors. What keeps the boys at home is laundry:

Actually, I did a fair amount of the wash when I was wed, although I suspect I was motivated at least in part by the desire to avoid doing some other unpleasant task.

And it is indeed true that, single again, I have taken some steps to reduce the amount of wash that needs to be done around here, but that's another story.

Count this as a vote for explanation B.

Two things in the mailbox this morning: a copy of Mad magazine and a class schedule for Metro Tech.

There's a message here somewhere.

Questions of aesthetics aside, it's probably easier for men than women when it comes to buying clothing: we specify a bunch of numbers and we get something that might actually fit, while they call off one number from a specified range and take their chances.

Not that I have any particular expertise in this realm, but I was able to comprehend Kathleen's proposal for changes in sizing for women:

(Aside: I think I know exactly one "average" woman.)

I seldom get into discussions of women's clothing with actual women, but once upon a time there was a young lady in the next office over who used to grumble about precisely this sort of issue. It didn't help that her particular dimensions were, um, inconsistent with the scale; I asked her once if there existed a Theory of Conservation of Sizes, and if it took someone shopping for swimsuits who wore a 6 top and an 8 bottom to cancel her out. (She gave me the "Are you out of your polyester-picking mind?" look I've seen so often before, but she was still smiling. I think.)

And I'm pretty sure I wouldn't want to try to pick a garment for myself based on a single number. My proportions, not surprisingly, are a tad askew: very few men six feet tall have a 28-inch inseam, and I have a spare tire, and not a compact spare at that.

Vagina Monologues? Not even, says Aldahlia:

(Note: I read this and came up with two different responses. Unable to pick between them, I'm tossing both of them up here.)

[1] The Monologues, of course, are yet another manifestation of that peculiar contemporary notion that how you feel is every bit as important as how you think, a notion I find somewhere between incomprehensible and indefensible.

[2] There is less restraint on this side of the gender divide: look at all the pricks who have their own blogs.

Okiedoke has good stuff this morning on "fusion philosophy," the idea that third parties of whatever persuasio