Put me down on the side of saving as much of New Orleans as possible.

But if it's not possible, here's a suggestion from Hatless in Hattiesburg, who is not actually in Hattiesburg and for all I know might actually have a hat:

Which, says H/H, solves three problems at once.

And, well, we haven't had a new refinery in almost 30 years, and gas prices are starting to look like this.

Addendum: A proposal from Engine of the Future to simplify the task of the refineries:

"B-b-but what about the environment?" I hear you cry. Yeah, you'll really miss that MTBE, won't you?

It is a truism in Republican circles that Democrats simply don't understand how markets operate. Turnabout being fair play, it's great fun to point out a GOP partisan who, to be charitable as possible about it, was blinded by his rage.

The Gazette's "Chicken Fried News" took a potshot at state Republican chairman Gary Jones a few issues back, which prompted this fume from a fellow on a Republican message board:

What's wrong with this scenario? It's obvious:

Eventually, the poor schmuck figured this out, but by then his fellow Republicans were berating him for his cluelessness.

There is rivalry, and there is utter silliness. Tulsa Mayor LaFortune, speaking at the groundbreaking of T-town's new downtown sports arena, flirted with the line of demarcation, and then flopped right over it:

Michael Bates calls this dementia exactly what it is:

Believe me, with Bill LaFortune running the show in Tulsa, Oklahoma City doesn't have a thing in the world to worry about — except maybe Des Moines.

Lindsay Beyerstein remembers Steve Goodman's "City of New Orleans", a small hit for Goodman, a bigger one for Arlo Guthrie, a great song about trains — and a great song about America. (The words are here.)

And I admit, it never occurred to me that ABC's morning show actually got its name from this song.

A page stolen from Neal McCaleb's diary, late last night:

You can't blame the guy for trying. (Or can you?)

Consumer Reports (October) is in a snit about fuel economy, specifically about the government-mandated mpg numbers that appear on the window sticker of new cars. According to CR, 90 percent of vehicles they tested failed to deliver the numbers on the sticker.

One reasonable complaint is that the EPA's test procedure, adopted in the 1970s, hasn't been updated to reflect changing driving conditions: combined fuel-economy ratings are still calculated on a 55-percent city, 45-percent highway mix, which is not always achievable in today's heavier traffic.

On the other hand, a couple pages into the story, they give away the game:

"Draw buyers"? How dare they.

And if I got 24 percent faster from 0-60 in a car that weighed 27 percent more and it cost me only 1.1 mpg, I'd be delighted.

It gets better:

Again with those damned customers.

Elsewhere in this issue, they seemed impressed with their Corvette, which returned "a respectable" 21 mpg. (EPA numbers are 18 city/28 highway with the 6-speed stick; they recorded 14/31.)

Two things:

1. When you can get 21 mpg out of four hundred horsepower, you probably ought not to complain;

2. Underpowered cars will not necessarily reward you with greater mileage, inasmuch as you have to rev the living whee out of them to get them motivated.
   

Then again, I have an underpowered car, out of which I routinely rev the living whee, and I still beat the government numbers. Maybe I should test the farging cars.

Sir George, a New Orleans refugee now holed up in Memphis, says all this could have been avoided:

Yeah, but wouldn't that have made it difficult to step down into a restaurant?

(I'm just saying.)

A South African inventor has come up with a female condom incorporating a device to discourage sexual assault.

Called, indelicately enough, "rapex," the gizmo is worn tampon-style; when the intruder performs insertion, it hooks into the dingus with sharp barbs and literally will not let go. The perp will have to seek medical attention, and, well, your friendly physician knows how it got there.

In addition to this particular benefit, "rapex" also provides, like a proper condom, protection against STDs carried by the rapist. I suspect this would sell well here in the States if it could get past the usual regulatory hurdles.

(Via Phil Dennison.)

From Michele:

It's simply that scum gets better press — nothing more.

Composer Ned Rorem complains to The New York Times:

One is tempted to ask, "Have you heard any of the music of the last 80 years?" Rorem, of course, has; he's written quite a lot of it. But he's hardly a staple of the American repertoire, and I have to assume that he's not at all happy about that.

Lynn isn't buying Rorem's complaint:

Imagine asking them "Who is Samuel Adams?"

There are a number of factors at work here, but they all boil down to "We play what the audience wants." And if too often it seems that what the audience wants is the same old thing, it's partly because the present-day marketplace doesn't make it easy to seek out the new and unheard — but it's also partly because some people, having heard it, don't particularly want to hear it again. And the conservatism of our orchestras and our ensembles and our radio stations is thus reinforced. The late Ainslee Cox, conductor and music director of the Oklahoma City Symphony Orchestra during the early 1980s, was a tireless champion of new music, premiering a number of new works every season; it was perhaps inevitable that he would clash with the mossbacks on the Symphony board, and he departed. (In a curious example of synchronicity, both Cox and the Symphony itself died in 1988.)

Cox's attitude, basically, was "Maybe they'll like it. It's certainly worth the effort." He certainly didn't seem to think that it was the audience's job to drag itself up to contemporary standards of au courant-ness, a sentiment Lynn would appreciate:

I used to call this "I Am An Artist, Dammit" Syndrome. However, the onus isn't entirely upon the composer to make himself accessible: the trick, of course, is getting the audience to meet him halfway.

Rumors are flying that the NBA's New Orleans Hornets may relocate to Oklahoma City on a temporary basis, perhaps even permanently.

Nothing is graven in stone just yet, of course. The most logical move for the Hornets, I think, is to relocate to LSU's Pete Maravich Center, just up the road in Baton Rouge. The downside is capacity: the Maravich seats only 14,000. Both Houston and Dallas have offered to host the Hornets on a temporary basis, and indeed the team staff has taken office space in Houston, courtesy of the Rockets, while the home office is drowned out.

But there are a couple of advantages to having the Hornets in Oklahoma City. If nothing else, we'd see, once and for all, if there's enough community support for a major-league sports team. The Ford Center holds 18,500 for basketball, slightly more than the New Orleans Arena. (A few Blazers hockey games would have to be bumped to the Cox in 2005-06.)

Whatever happens, it has to happen quickly: the Hornets' season opens 2 November at Cleveland, and their first home game (vs. Sacramento) is only two days later.

Addendum: From OKPartisan's post on this subject:

Another addendum: R. Alex contemplates the fate of that other New Orleans team:

I suspect they'd rather have the Hornets close to home, too.

Bless you, Matt Welch:

I'd say "San Diego," but someone is sure to bring up wildfires.

Meanwhile, I'm here in Tornado Alley, watching the sky. Anyone taking bets on the next asteroid strike?

Actually, I suppose this is technically two questions:

(No, this is not to cement my position at the top of searches for "Yugoslavian crotch bugle".)

The mark of the superior blogger is the ability to get a good story out of the most mundane incident you can possibly imagine.

With that in mind: Jeff gets a haircut.

No, really.

We saw this before, when the prices first surged over one dollar:

Anyone who lived through the previous gas crunches could have anticipated this sort of thing, which presumably includes this guy:

McSpadden, in fact, owned four gas stations in 1973. He, of all people, should know better.

A British secondary school is taking the radical step of grouping students by ability instead of by age, reports the Guardian:

"GCSE" expands to "General Certificate of Secondary Education," formerly known familiarly as "O-levels". The student must take a GCSE exam in each core subject, usually after the 11th year of school, before further progress can be made.

Bridgemary has been on the British equivalent of a Needs Improvement list, and the new regimen seems to be helping somewhat:

And there will be more of this, says Mrs Heron:

The association for secondary-school heads seems to approve:

Of course, somebody had to object to this sort of thing:

To which Erin O'Connor replies:

Aside to Bob Moore, superintendent, Oklahoma City Public Schools: You ban the word "self-esteem" from all school correspondence from this day forward, and I promise faithfully to support any and all millage increases for the district, now and forever, so long as the ban remains in effect.

Some time between now and early April, when this site celibates celebrates its tenth anniversary, I've got to decide whether I want to stick with my hand-drawn templates, try to draw new ones, or outsource the job to someone with actual talent.

For that matter, I've got to decide what I'm going to do about the mechanisms behind the scenes. I have MT 2.64 pretty well under control, but by now they're up to 3.2, and there's a limit to just how retro I'm willing to remain: while I have far less spammage than I used to, and only a handful of occasional trolls, I'd like to have some more up-to-date tools to deal with those, um, individuals.

On the other hand, just for the hell of it, I installed WordPress on another domain I own, and I will be doing some fiddling with it; WordPress may turn out to be my option of choice for this site as well. At the very least, I figured I should give it a look-see.

Whatever the difficulties with refining capacity may be, they don't seem to have had quite as much effect on diesel fuel; #2 diesel, which at the beginning of the summer was about twenty cents pricier than regular unleaded, is now about twenty cents cheaper. I didn't see any diesel today priced at more than $2.90, while 87-octane gas at most places is in the general vicinity of $3.10.

The simplest explanation is that the stations don't sell as much diesel, and therefore they're still running on price trends from a week or so ago, but this seems a bit unlikely, especially since truck stops sell plenty of diesel and they're not, for the moment, more expensive. Could it be that most of the refineries that produce diesel, at least for this area, were not located along the coast and therefore didn't suffer storm damage?

I'm guessing that this isn't enough of a price shift to motivate people to go buy diesel-powered cars — it certainly wouldn't be for me — but these days, anything seems possible.

I suspect this was in the works long before Katrina, but it's here now: a twelve-page booklet issued by the state Department of Health, with the imprimaturs of the Department of Emergency Management and the Office of Homeland Security, dubbed the Family Readiness Guide: Plan, Prepare, Be Aware.

The booklet contains helpful hints for anticipating evacuations, government contact points, a wallet card upon which you can list emergency information, a list of documents you ought to try to protect (including computer backup media!), and other useful bits of information.

I got my copy in the Sunday Oklahoman, scattered among the two or three dozen ad pieces; other papers in the state will presumably be carrying it also.

Almost any paragraph from this piece by Julie R. Neidlinger, though the one I want to single out is this one:

Truer words have ne'er been spoken.

The first two sidewalk plaques have been placed in Deep Deuce, in honor of James "Doughbelly" Brooks, guardian of Deep Deuce history and beaming presence at the Golden Oak Barber Shop, and Russell M. Perry, publisher of the Black Chronicle and operator of a statewide radio group. (A dart to Leland Gourley of Friday, who was so proud to be there, and who misidentified Perry as the publisher of the Black Dispatch.)

At the dedication ceremony, Mayor Cornett recalled some of the fabled places of Deep Deuce (all addresses are on NE 2nd Street unless specified otherwise), including:

• The Aldridge Theater at 303, run by music teacher Zella Page Breaux; her students included Jimmy Rushing and Charlie Christian.

• Ruby's Grill at 322½, despite its name and unassuming address a huge nightclub.

• The Black Dispatch office at 324 (formerly a gas station), Roscoe Dunjee's pioneering newspaper. (Dunjee had originally set up shop on 1st.)

• Anderson Building at 327, named for oilman Forest Anderson, which housed the Golden Oak.

• Randolph's Drug Store at 331, possibly the state's leading soda fountain in those days.

• Calvary Baptist Church at 300 N Walnut, launching point for civil-rights activities.
  

There were many, many more, but with the exception of Calvary Baptist, which is now Covenant Life Center, the one thing they all have in common is absence: this block of Deep Deuce was bulldozed years ago.

It's wonderful to have people actually living in Deep Deuce again, and it's good to see the city remembering its heritage, but there's still the sensation that maybe they waited just a little too long to remember.

Chief Justice William Rehnquist has died at his home in Arlington, his three children by his side.

Rehnquist, 80, had been diagnosed with thyroid cancer last fall, and had been widely expected to step down from the Supreme Court, a move he steadfastly refused to make.

The fall session of the Court begins on 3 October.

That's Doc Searls' term for the unwinding of the Gulf Coast catastrophe and the inevitable drive to avoid a repeat performance, and while I think the title is just a little too facile, he understands the dynamics as well as anyone:

The only problem with this scenario is that it didn't occur to enough people a week and a half ago.

What does it take to make the best blog in the state?

So says Chase McInerney, and the results bear him out.

My congratulations to Chase and his occasional co-bloggers on winning the hearts and minds of Oklahoma's blog community.

I have no doubt that somewhere, some greener-than-thou type is watching the price of gasoline rise to $3.50, $4, $5, God knows where, and doing a Marv Albertesque "Yes! Now maybe those people will give up their damn cars and ride the bus like they should."

Not a chance, Snowflake:

And there remain those who are anxious to point out that poor people don't have all these options. This is, of course, one of many reasons why it sucks to be poor, and if you have any ambition and any sense, you'll reorient your life so at some point you become not poor. (Waiting around for the government to do things for you, incidentally, is neither ambitious nor sensible.)

Reasons to support the American Veterinary Medical Foundation in these trying times:

Suggested by Liz Ditz.

A proposal by The Downtown Guy:

It will take some bold steps through the city bureaucracy, but I like it. Certainly we've got the inventory of homes, and the city has been willing in recent months to take unusual steps to reduce it, which suggests to me that it can be pulled off.

Take that, Andy Warhol, and welcome, New York Daily News readers.

Sheesh. How am I supposed to keep a low profile these days?

On the treadle, even.

Brought to you at much greater length by Hatless in Hattiesburg.

Forté has brought out Agent 3.0, and it has more of a learning curve than previous versions of this venerable Usenet software: it now supports multiple news servers, which is a boon, but its new folder structure threw me at first.

Still, it's wicked fast compared to its predecessors: instead of queuing tasks, it splits them into threads and runs them simultaneously when system resources and user demands permit. I don't do that much nntp stuff anymore — maybe twenty newsgroups or so — but I'm guessing I'm using maybe a third less time negotiating those groups, which would justify the price, had they charged me anything for upgrading from a paid 2.x version, which they didn't.

They're not exactly enthusiastic, but they're endorsing it:

They don't say so anywhere, but the entire editorial, to me anyway, seems to be a shrug and a tossed-off "Well, if this is the best we can do...."

What I fear is the possibility that maybe this is the best we can do. But the likelihood that it's going to pass while there's a big 3 up on the price board — or worse, a 4 — is, I suspect, next to nil.

Small socially-redeeming value: the people who use the most gas would pay the most tax, which seems at least somewhat fair, and the tax increases would not push us beyond the regional averages.

I think I could support this thing if it had an actual expiration date on it. But it doesn't, and there's no way they're going to let go of this revenue even if they actually get all the billions of bucks worth of backlog completed.

Do what you wanna do.

By which is meant, I'm busy this morning, so here's another open thread. The last one wasn't abused, so I expect this one should work similarly well.

Is Harry Reid out of his depth? Get a load of this:

How exactly are the stakes higher? The Chief Justice is but one vote among nine; his opinion counts no more than that of any other member of the Court. As a reward for his title, he gets some extra paperwork and the task of counting heads.

Of course, Reid once said he could back Antonin Scalia for Chief Justice, which suggests to me that Reid might be thinking the affable John Roberts would actually be more efficient at building a reliable conservative consensus on the Court than would the caustic Scalia.

Or it could just mean that they cut off a random thirty seconds from the big spool of audio clips in the back of Howard Dean's office, and this is the one Reid got.

Not the Caravan album, but a new Bill Whittle essay.

I don't watch a lot of porn for the same reason I don't watch a lot of cable-TV news: sound and fury, idiots, you know the drill.

On the other hand, I'd pay to get a look at this it were ever to come to, um, fruition. [Not even slightly safe for work.]

I mentioned earlier that I was messing around with WordPress; while I'm not planning to convert this place — at least, not yet — I did want to familiarize myself with some of its operations and get used to the idea of working in a PHP environment.

What I did, therefore, was tear down an old static page elsewhere that had the graphics from the custom CDs I've burned, which has been sitting there for two or three years, and replaced it with what will eventually be a complete catalog, including track listings, for the forty-odd discs I've produced for around-the-house and motoring use. It will take a while, but the first seven discs are in place, and the others will follow as time permits.

If nothing else, this should help me cut down the number of duplicate tracks on subsequent issues.

I was out by Shepherd Mall today, and it occurred to me that I'd not actually been in the place for at least 15 years. Of course, now that it's been converted to the world's shortest office tower, there's little to attract random visitors, but I remember coming up there when I was much younger and thinking it was the greatest thing since sliced bread. (The greatest thing before sliced bread is still debatable.)

The city has been working on improving the general appearance of 23rd Street over the past few years, but the spiffed-up streetscapes end at Villa, on the western edge of Shepherd Mall. On an impulse, when I got home I decided to see if there are any plans to extend the beautification process, and sure enough, there are. In the proposed 2005-06 Oklahoma City budget document — they haven't posted the final approved version yet — there's this:

It's a little over a mile from Villa to I-44, and a mile and a half from Kelley to I-35, so this is a tall order indeed.

One other thing: I got lazy today and didn't bother to put on my usual shoes (various New Balance sorta-athletic types), and I discovered that my driving style is markedly different in sandals. I'm assuming it's because of the difference in foot pressure, but this seems too facile an answer.

Everyone please be seated.

(Via ad-rag.com.)

Yes, I used to watch this fairly regularly:

Now subtract all of the sexual tension, most of the humor, scroll back to the part about the technically-nonexistent individual created from whole cloth — and imagine how she might feel.

Oh, well, I'm sure there's someone out there who insists you call him Ishmael, too.

The city and the Union Pacific Railroad are at odds again over the redesigned Walnut Avenue Bridge. Five months into the project, which is due to be completed next spring, the warring parties are still far apart on who pays how much for what, and the railroad is complaining that the city's design, which eliminates one side track, makes it unnecessarily difficult to switch trains below the bridge. The Corporation Commission agreed with the railroad and ordered the city to come up with an alternative design; the city responded with a design that relocates the single track for greater clearance.

Four years ago, the city wanted to demolish the bridge and put up a grade crossing; I can't help but wonder if maybe someone at City Hall is wishing they'd gone ahead with that plan.

There's a worthy debate going on between Mike and Sean on the dodgy subject of price gouging.

I tend toward the free-market approach in such matters — the value of something is equal to what someone is willing to pay for it — but Mike wonders just how free a market we have:

Back during the Energy Crises of the late 20th century, there was a lot of thundering about "obscene" profits. Now to my way of thinking, losses are a lot more obscene than profits, but it was pretty clear that a very large number of people felt that they were being screwed by Big Oil, and I suspect that the same situation persists today. I don't believe that Big Oil, at least the domestic manifestation of it, is particularly cartel-like: most of these firms will happily stab each other in the back for a couple of points of market share. (Not that this has never happened in OPEC.) Defense contractors, however, work on a different dynamic; there is seldom competition on a given project, and they tend to build stuff for cost plus. Needless to say, "plus" leaves all kinds of opportunities to fatten the take at the expense of the taxpayers. Not that they make a habit of this, of course. (And I'm reasonably certain that they can explain away every last dime.)

Bottom line: I feel less gouged by $3.10 gas than I do by a $600 hammer, even if the hammer is mil-spec. Your mileage may vary.

Britney Spears is having a new wedding ring made because, she says:

And that, presumably, is what it's all about.

Bob Denver, the least-clueful of seven stranded castaways on Gilligan's Island, has died at a North Carolina hospital at the age of 70.

His journey to heaven surely will be quite a bit less than a three-hour tour.

A National Review editorial makes this curious recommendation:

Assuming, of course, there's some, you know, recovery by mid-2008.

Although Reason's Nick Gillespie has a point:

I suspect I'll see the Democrats in East St. Louis first.

(Yeah, I know, I've been a hawk all this time. I still am. But I don't see Baghdad being any more ready for this sort of thing than New Orleans during the time frame specified.)

Been here, done this:

Unlike Susanna, I haven't taken any time off from the blog. Maybe I should.

But it's probably not going to happen, because if I don't vent here, the places I do vent are apt to be very, very distraught — once the translators arrive, that is.

Once a month the city picks up Big Junk from curbside, and in my neighborhood this happens on the first Wednesday of the month, which means that all manner of urban and/or suburban detritus is stacked up in people's yards awaiting disposal.

Usually I don't pay much attention to it, but this morning, someone had, not one, but two toilets, tank and bowl, sitting by the curb. Now there's nothing particularly unusual about having a pair of stools — a bath and a half was the norm for houses one size class larger than mine, even 60 years ago — but I shudder to think what would require that both be replaced at once. And if it's simply a matter of redecorating, well, I wish I had that kind of, you should pardon the expression, cash flow.

Now that everyone knows George W. Bush, without Karl Rove's knowledge, broke into the Dark Lord's chambers and cranked up the weather-control device, thereby causing Hurricane Katrina, it's about time we looked into some other previous "accidents" in which the Bush family had an unsteady hand.

For instance, the Black Plague:

And if you think that's bad, consider this:

That's the way, uh-huh, uh-huh, I like it, uh-huh, uh-huh.

(Borrowed from miriam's ideas.)

Which is why you run into issues like this, as I once discovered at The Spoon Sexperience.

(Via Lifehacker.)

Emblazoned on a Whataburger bag:

Um, they did this time.

I really wasn't expecting my lawn mower to throw a wheel this evening.

Actually, it didn't throw the wheel, exactly, but the attachment was looser than Paris Hilton's code of conduct: I pulled up the deck and there was about ¾ turn left before the wheel and the bolt parted company.

It was an easy-enough fix with the Vise-Grip®, but what I wonder is this: Why didn't I notice it when I put it away Saturday morning? A wheel skewed 15 degrees is, to say the least, kind of obvious.

Carnival is here.
One hundred fifty-five times
I have done this shtick.

Almost anyone who's tried to make a living off an elpee's worth of toons, it seems, has had some sort of complaint about a record company.

Filling in at Majikthise — Lindsay is in Baton Rouge helping out with relief efforts and other things under the auspices of the Swing State Project — Thad points to one problem, and a solution in the making:

What brought them together was, of course, the action of a record company, in this case Knitting Factory, whose new owners basically trashed all the existing contracts with their artists. What's worse, they started throwing out their inventory. Why? It's a record company. Who knows?

Eventually, an agreement was reached: the 28 plaintiffs will receive a full accounting of royalties, ownership rights to the material recorded, return of the original masters, and the right to buy up existing inventory at $2/unit.

I have to admit, I'm starting to understand why so many musicians are releasing their own CDs.

The Atlantic storm season, which runs through the end of November, has already seen sixteen fifteen storms big enough to name; there being only 21 names assigned — there are few names starting with Q and U, and no one ever envisioned getting down to X, Y and Z — the system allows for only five six more.

(Storms #22 and subsequent are designated by Greek letters, so the next storm after Wilma will be called Alpha. Just what we need: an Alpha storm.)

"Oh, let's just send someone over with a cart and pick it up."

"Is it ready to be picked up?"

"I don't know. But I'm certainly ready for it."

If that's possible. Call it Garbage Soup:

Having once attempted to simulate Bloody Mary mix with a fistful of ketchup packets, I'm not even going to scoff.

A couple weeks ago I brought up the topic of Tulsa's "third penny" sales tax, and suggested that its renewal wasn't exactly a sure thing despite Mayor LaFortune's town meetings to promote it:

One such Tulsan is the Mad Okie:

Bobby at Tulsa Topics sees it similarly:

Two people do not a movement make, but I'm thinking there's a lot more than two out there.

Mr Scott, of course, would tell you you canna do that, Captain, but nowhere does it say in the manual that you can't avoid facing them head on.

Your serious drivers eschew front-wheel drive: with two-thirds or so of their weight up front, fwd cars understeer at the limit and often well short of the limit, and sending your power through the same wheels you steer means that sooner or later you're going to put your foot in it and head off into the weeds. This latter phenomenon is called torque steer, and the only reason I don't often experience it in my fwd car is because it doesn't have enough power to force the issue. (Believe me, I've tried.)

Building a fwd performance sedan, therefore, requires some serious rethinking of those laws. The brain trust at Pontiac thought it over, and reasoned: "If we want to improve traction on a rear-driver, we'd put bigger tires on the back. What if ...."

And apparently no one thought of this before. The new Grand Prix GXP has fat 225/50-18 tires in back — and fatter 255/45-18 tires in front. Wouldn't this bigger contact patch make torque steer worse? Apparently the controlling factor is the stiffness of the sidewall. (Tire pressures are the same 30 psi front and rear.)

Car and Driver has a full road test in the October issue. Between this and the new Solstice roadster, the We Build Excitement guys might actually be building some excitement these days.

W — the magazine, not the President — sent me this lovely invitation yesterday:

Two things occur to me:

1. Were I among a very small group of women right now, I wouldn't have time (and, I hope, the inclination) to type;

2. Harper's Bazaar must be renting the subscriber list again.
   

Of course, if I turn down this invitation, I won't be the "first to know where to buy jewelry from the designer who created Madonna's wedding ring," but I think I can survive a trauma of that magnitude.

Courtesy of Minneapolis candidate for mayor Marcus Harcus:

I'd hazard a guess that almost everyone in Minneapolis, perhaps the whole of Hennepin County, is "life interested."

But this is a bit too Oprahesque, if you ask me. And if you ask Lileks?

He can say he's a dreamer, but he's not the only one.

A mere fourteen months after picking the site, Dell Inc. will be throwing open the doors to its new Oklahoma City customer-contact center on Monday. Dell CEO Kevin Rollins, Governor Henry and Mayor Cornett will be on hand for the grand opening.

A second building is already under construction at the Dell campus, south of the Oklahoma River and west of Portland Avenue.

Jeff Jarvis had no comment has a comment.

The last good monument built in the United States is down the road from me a couple of miles.

We don't do good monuments anymore, partly because we're afraid that some segment of the society might take umbrage, a reasonable fear given the fact that so many segments have hired professional umbrage-takers. Beyond this, there's the belief among some people that a monument must contain within its scope an anti-monument, a statement that "Yes, this happened here, but we want to make sure you hear our side of the story," whether it's relevant or not. (Hint: It's not.)

Still, even allowing for that, I'm damned if I can understand what they're trying to do at the Pennsylvania site where the passengers of Flight 93 took down a plane rather than allow a squad of Muslim hijackers to crash it into a government facility. Maybe Sean Gleeson can figure it out.

Hmmm....

(From John Podhoretz on "The Corner" at NRO.)

In the twenty-one years since county-option liquor by the drink was authorized in Oklahoma, forty-two counties have opted to open the taps at the watering holes.

That leaves thirty-five who haven't, one of which is Lincoln County, northeast of Oklahoma City, and this makes life perhaps a little more difficult for the county's winemakers: about half the state's grapes are grown in Lincoln, but you can't even get a taste at the vineyard.

The growers, therefore, have offered to foot the bill for a county-option election this December, which will cost them around $7000 or so.

Lincoln County last voted on this issue in 1986, and turned it down by a two-to-one margin.

Scott Lemieux happens upon the announcement of the new top man at FEMA, and his qualifications are just about perfect:

Not even Michael Brown himself could make such claims.

And elsewhere, today being World Naked Gardening Day.

Discover magazine (October) asked Dr Walter Willett, professor of epidemiology and nutrition at the Harvard School of Public Health, "Why aren't people getting enough Vitamin D these days?" His response:

And, occasionally, to bend over and pull a weed or two.

The Oklahoman's Berry Tramel is all over the court.

Last weekend:

This weekend:

What caused this 180? A note from editor Ed Kelley? A promise of season tickets? I have no idea.

Former Vice President Al Gore put up 100k for two charter flights to New Orleans, airlifting about 270 residents of the beleaguered city, including patients at Charity Hospital, to points in Tennessee.

As James Joyner says:

And yes, Gore was on the bash-Bush circuit yesterday, speaking to the Sierra Club, but he made a point of not tooting his own horn, which deserves some sort of credit.

Somehow I doubt she'd find this just right.

(This, incidentally, is one reason why you should never write HTML in Word; it can't keep track of tag attributes reliably.)

She was lovely, she was smiling, and she was driving a refrigerator, so naturally I had to talk to her, and that's why you're getting this report on an appliance-white Scion xB.

The top-selling vehicle at Toyota's youth-oriented brand — the Scion Web site is larded with annoying hip-hop effluvia to remind you of its mission — the xB is unmistakably and unabashedly a box, and Toyota was reportedly surprised that it was outselling its more-normal-looking cousin xA by two or three to one. What's more, its buyers are less likely to be 22-year-olds new to the automotive market than fortyish types who want practicality and don't want to pay out the nose for it.

So it was with this xB owner, who asserted that she could stash nearly as much stuff in the Scion as she could in her Suburban, and what's more, it drinks half the gas. She and the spousal unit prefer the Chevy for freeway duty, mostly because of that road-hugging weight, but most of the time, the fridge is more than adequate, which is a lot more than one expects for $15k right out of the, um, box.

Even feeding Suburbans is a little easier this week, with gas prices falling below $2.70 for the low-suds stuff in some parts of town; I'm not ready to characterize it as a free-fall, but I see a slow dropoff for the next couple of weeks as the Gulf Coast situation becomes less heinous.

Related, this sign on a church in Bethany: EVEN IF WE COULD DRIVE TO HEAVEN WE COULDN'T AFFORD TO GO. This seems a bit pessimistic for a Christian denomination, if you ask me.

There's a club on NW 50th called The Store, which sounds like the opening gambit in a domestic drama. ("Honey, where are you going?" "Oh, just to The Store.") Further down 50th is the Warr Acres line, and I noticed that they haven't updated the signs to reflect the new, higher sales tax — not that I really expected them to.

The west side of the city presumably continues to pick up Spanish-speaking inhabitants: I caught a glimpse of an electronic church sign displaying the word MIERCOLES. Wednesday. Of course. I doubt this is the situation that's causing the death of the Baskin-Robbins east of 23rd and Meridian — proximity to a Braum's is the more likely culprit — but I have no doubt that a lot more changes are in store for this part of town.

I wasn't always hawkish on matters relating to the Middle East; the year or so I spent in that general region at the behest of Uncle Sam tended to make me a bit concilatory toward even the more wayward practitioners of Islam.

In fact, I wrote this on 13 September 2001:

Then again, I'd pretty much made up my mind that I wasn't going to whine about things either:

Four years later, I'd fault him for seriously underestimating the sheer quantity of said losers, and I'd fault some of my countrymen for doing their damnedest to make his task more difficult. The political unity we enjoyed after the 11th clearly didn't last. But the vast outpouring of help in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, from people on every point on the political curve, tells me that contrary to what some of the pundits would have us believe, we're not coming apart at the seams, not ripping ourselves to pieces over policy and politics, not turning the whole of the national dialogue into two overlapping monologues. It's simply not happening: we disagree on lots of things, but we still agree on some of the most important ones. And because it's not happening, the score, after four years, remains: Us 1, Terrorists 0.

It's a narrow lead, perhaps, but it's a lead just the same.

Saturday, Jacqueline Passey, quite unintentionally, got her first taste of Costa Rican health care. What did she think? A report from the emergency room:

But the true joy of the day came afterwards:

I trust the reader to draw his own conclusions.

Today's bogus letter not actually from PayPal claims that the service will now actually call you on your cell phone every time there's a transaction — as "fraud prevention," of course. Needless to say, you're supposed to key in all your PayPal information plus your wireless number to this handy site.

Which site, incidentally, is msg-paypal.com, owned, says joker.com's Whois, by a fellow up in British Columbia, and created, by chance, just yesterday.

Just one more way SMS is becoming the Scammer Message Service, I suppose.

This Speculum poll spells it out:

Sample question:

(Disclosed by miriam's ideas.)

The problem with Louisiana's emergency planning, says Alan Sullivan, is vestigial Sixties feminism:

Well, not exactly everything:

Two points:

1. Womanhood and ninnitude are not mutually exclusive (cf. Barbara Boxer, Kathie Lee Gifford).

2. This trend started before the 1960s, says Francis W. Porretto:
   

And what happened during the fifty years that followed?

At some point, this was cutesified into "Real Men don't eat quiche." But Bruce Feirstein, who wrote the book which bore this title, pointed out that the Real Man wasn't necessarily retrosexual, inarticulate and possessed of an indiscriminate palate. The Real Man, in fact, wasn't even necessarily male (cf. Katharine Hepburn, Commander Susan Ivanova).

What does it take? The two criteria (Porretto again):

Louisiana, pre-Katrina, manifestly had problems with both of these.

I managed to hose up the previous-page links on my WordPress site today, which eventually proved to be the fault of a badly-written (by me) .htaccess file. I wrote it in a text editor, not in the WordPress editor, and duly CHMODed it to 644, but the syntax was twisted beyond any reasonable parsing. This also explains why a copy of said file wasn't working properly at this site.

Incidentally, it is not wise to open forty-three (!) Firefox browser tabs at once, especially if you have a QuickTime video running in one of them, unless you have more RAM than God, which seems unlikely. (Then again, there is no evidence to indicate that God runs Windows, though I suspect He allowed Job to download a copy.)

I am unabashedly theist, possibly even Deist, with vaguely-Christian leanings which of late have become somewhat less vague. This much you should know up front.

That said, I'd definitely like to see The God Who Wasn't There, a documentary by "former fundamentalist" Brian Flemming, last seen putting together Bat Boy: The Musical, likely the only theatrical production based upon a Weekly World News character. (Personally, I'm champing at the bit for My America: The Ed Anger Story.)

My curiosity is motivated by two factors:

1. Flemming, on the film distributor's official site, seems to be comparing himself to Michael Moore and Morgan Spurlock, and, well, I've always had a soft spot for people who were full of crap but were entertaining about it;

2. The cast includes Barbara and David Mikkelson, aka Snopes.com.
   

And until there's a full-fledged exposé on the Pastafarians, this will have to satisfy my occasional thirst for rank heresy.

(Suggested by Leaning Towards the Dark Side.)

Microsoft offers open-source advocate/theorist Eric S. Raymond a job.

Mr Raymond graciously declines:

I think we can take that as a No.

Dan Li, graduate student in communications at Marquette, came up with this thesis for her Master's degree: Why Do You Blog: A Uses-and-Gratifications Inquiry into Bloggers' Motivations. I was not one of the respondents to her survey, or this section would surely have come out different:

In the 179-page document itself is a set of gender variances:

The higher prevalence of pseudonyms among the females is no surprise, but I wouldn't have guessed that men prefer to futz around with their templates more than women do; women, after all, have designed a rather substantial percentage of the big-name blogs.

(Snagged from Population Statistic; Costa did participate in the Li study.)

Using our very own mascot, Fred explains how we got so many of these blooms staring us in the face:

Sunflowers are produced commercially, for the oil or for the seeds, but I always think of them as old friends by the side of the road, waving as I go by.

The California Assembly has passed a bill which would simplify the task of removing old racial covenants from real-estate records. Since 1948, these "agreements" to sell only to [fill in name of ethnic group], or not to sell to [fill in name of other ethnic group], have been legally unenforceable — the Supreme Court ruled in Shelley v. Kraemer that no court could be required to enforce such a covenant, per the 14th Amendment, though the Court did not actually invalidate the covenants themselves — but actually getting them off the property records has required a lot of jumping through various legal hoops and had to be done one parcel at a time. (If you'd like to see what these looked like, a standard covenant used in Chicago may be found here.)

Under AB 394, should a property owner request, a copy of the covenant will be forwarded to counsel for the county; should the covenant be found by counsel to be racially discriminatory, the recorder will strike references to it from every parcel in the subdivision.

Out-of-date laws — especially out-of-date bad laws — are always worth the effort to expunge. Governor Schwarzenegger ought to sign this measure promptly.

(Via McGehee.)

Steel Turman throws cold water on the very idea of making New Orleans livable again; what's left behind after the flood water recedes "makes Chernobyl look like a small grease fire in your neighbor's kitchen." To wit:

And that's just the inorganics:

Clean it up? Forget about it:

I think this would probably discourage me from Mardi Gras for a while.

(Via Daily Pundit.)