While I think this Blog Family Tree is a dandy idea, I'd been having a dickens of a time trying to figure out where, if anywhere, I belonged on this particular structure. Surely I have no blogchildren: if anything, I've discouraged people from this sort of thing. And in my official first blog post, in the summer of 2000, there is no reference to any particular individual who might have provided inspiration to me.

But of all the sites I was reading in the late 1990s, the most pertinent to my own decision to turn this site into a blog, I believe, was #!/usr/bin/girl, run by a "digital anime girl" in Seattle. She's utterly unaware of my existence, I'm sure, but I've always found her stuff endlessly fascinating. If I have a blogparent, it's Zannah, and I am informing the Commissar accordingly.

It appears that Lachlan and Bayou will be back, whether or not they're able to recover their archives. (Bayou says, "I can't even get into all that is lost or I might start throwing things around my office," and you can't blame her.)

Assuming that Susanna eventually will be back, and that Michele really isn't returning this time, that leaves one item on my Blog Wish List: that Meryl Yourish becomes swiftly employed (and, if possible, somewhat overpaid).

Addendum, 9:40 am: Chris Muir is helping with the Hire Meryl campaign. Bless you, sir.

2000: Zero.
2001: Zero.
2002: Zero.
2003: Zero.
2004: Zero.
2005: Five!

Too early to detect a trend, maybe, but at least this year I didn't buy three bags full of candy in vain.

To a pilot, this is the standard procedure for coming out of a climbing stall. George W. Bush surely knows this.

It might also work in non-aircraft maneuvers as well.

Senator Leahy was on C-Span yesterday, and reportedly complained that Judge Alito "won't bring any more diversity to the Supreme Court than I do to the Senate." Which prompts the following question:

Impeachment isn't on the table: this is neither a high crime nor a misdemeanor. But it's fair to say that consistency, foolish or otherwise, isn't the hobgoblin of Leahy's mind.

And besides:

I'd pay to see that. (There are black lesbian conservatives, aren't there?)

Somehow I don't think she received them — and if she did, she surely didn't act on them — but nonetheless, here's a list of notes from Ann Coulter's editor.

My favorite:

(Via Mister Snitch!)

Salon's King Kaufman predicts the NBA season, and no surprise as to the identity of the dweller in the Southwest Division cellar:

I dunno. Could they beat the 1996-97 Oklahoma City Cavalry of the CBA, who actually won the league championship?

We'll never know for sure. At this moment, a few hours before the season begins, I'm inclined to think that finishing 31-51 would qualify as a moral victory. (I'm expecting more like 25-57.)

Lindsay Beyerstein extends a metaphor:

I'm not sure where cholera fits into this pattern, but frankly, if I get to the point where I need to be encouraged to behave irresponsibly, I'm probably not going to have any fun at all.

More to the point, if you followed this opposition to its logical conclusion, it would perforce be a Bad Thing were someone to discover, for instance, a 99-percent foolproof cure for genital herpes; the evil miracle drug would have to be suppressed, lest people actually start inserting Tab A into Slot B — as though they ever stopped in the first place. (Persons oriented toward different methods should substitute as appropriate.) I am persuaded that this approach is seriously wrongheaded, though I reserve the right to change my mind should I be stuck in line at the Sav-on and discover packets of Aunt Meg's Vacu-Lyptus Mentholated Abortion Drops sitting there next to the Pamprin.

It's not particularly difficult to toast an oven mitt the same way you'd warm up a flour tortilla, but there's no good reason to want to.

Hornets 93, Kings 67 in front of 19,163. A proper christening for the Ford Center.

Two factors: the Hornets owned the boards, and Sacramento, down only one point after the first quarter, went from indifferent shooting to cold to downright glacial.

Last year's Bees started the season with a 2-29 run. Not gonna happen this year.

During halftime of last night's Hornets/Kings game, Mayor Cornett, interviewed on the radio, was sticking to the script: when New Orleans is ready once again, the team will return home.

But that word "ready" is open to all manner of interpretation, and while it's still a fact that there is no commitment beyond 2005-06, anything can happen. Cornett, a sportscaster most of his life, knows this perfectly well.

It's way too early to predict anything, of course: the Bees were an indifferent 3-5 in preseason, and there are still 81 games to go. But if the Sacramento Kings, one of the most consistent teams in the league, can stumble this badly at the Ford — well, I'm betting they're relieved that they don't have to come back here this season. (There will be two games in Sacramento, and one in Baton Rouge.) And if the Ford itself becomes something of a "secret weapon," if other teams become spooked at the very thought of coming here, it will be that much harder to pack up and move after the season ends.

But we won't know anything about that until a week from Wednesday, when Orlando comes to town. In the meantime, I'm going to work on pronouncing "Bostjan Nachbar."

There's very little I can add to this:

I see one parallel in my own life: were I to attempt a courtship melody, I'm sure she wouldn't give a rat's ass, as it were.

(Via miriam's ideas.)

Two perfectly reasonably questions from Syaffolee:

If I ever do one of these — and if I do, Andrea Harris will disown me — I promise not to call it a "podcast." (The horrible-sound problem has been discussed here.)

Carnival of the Vanities #163 is up and about, courtesy of Free Money Finance, which has arranged this week's entries in order of arrival, surely an inspired touch.

If you tuned in looking for my usual discussion of the number itself, well, here you go: In 2003, Rep. Charlie Rangel (D-NY) introduced HR 163, which would reinstate the draft and, he said, equalize the sacrifices involved in war:

It was, of course, a crock, and Rangel knew it; even he voted against it, which should give you an idea of how much you should trust anything in which he says he truly believes.

The Texas legislature earlier this year passed something called Proposition 2, which on the face of it appears to be poorly drafted:

One wonders if said political subdivisions even have to recognize actual marriages.

In an effort to push this proposition, your friends at the Ku Klux Klan are holding a rally in Austin this weekend, and this looks like an appropriate response to the visiting Klux:

So there will be a passel of folks on hand to moon the Klan, an idea with a certain visceral appeal. Unfortunately, this restricts participation to the general area of central Texas — or does it?

And do it today, before your work schedule puts you hopelessly behind.

(Suggested by the highly-not-safe-for-work Fleshbot.)

Or at least to dazzle.

The next prototype is due in the spring. (It's tech, Jim, but not as we know it.)

Well, okay, two in a row might have been a bit much to hope for.

But you have to figure that any night that LeBron James hits five 3-pointers in a row is a night you're not going to enjoy — unless, of course, you're a Cavs fan.

109-87. Next to Houston, to take on the Rockets.

Milestones at R. E. "Ted" Turner's original flagship property:

January 1970: Turner buys struggling WJRJ-TV, channel 17, in Atlanta, and renames it WTCG-TV.

December 1976: Claiming the name "Superstation," WTCG begins delivering its signal via satellite to cable systems.

May 1977: Having purchased the Atlanta Braves baseball club, Turner declares himself manager. He is replaced after one game, the team's 17th consecutive loss. In another Braves-related matter, Andy Messerschmidt is assigned #17, and instead of his name or nickname across his shoulder blades, he wears the word CHANNEL, a plug for WTCG. The Commissioner of Major League Baseball is not amused.

June 1979: Turner sacks popular news dude Bill Tush because his flippancy might reflect poorly on Turner Broadcasting's newest venture, a 24-hour news channel.

November 1979: Turner acquires the WTBS call by donating $25,000 worth of equipment to its owner, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. (The MIT station became WMBR.)

September 1996: Debut of Dinner and a Movie, a Friday-night series which combines feature films and food.

June 1999: TBS (no longer using the W except on its Atlanta broadcast signal) debuts The Chimp Channel. No effect on CNN is noticed.

November 2005: TBS (now advertising itself as "very funny") introduces a "very funny" Texas Holdem poker game for its Web site, created by the reasonably jocular Sean Gleeson.

Last night, for the first time, the Beacon of Hope sliced its way into the sky.

The Beacon, located in the middle of the circular Stiles Park (NE 8th and Stiles), is the centerpiece of Founders Plaza, a monument to the five men who put together what is now known as the Oklahoma Health Center. The one survivor of the five, Stanton L. Young, was on hand for the first-night celebration, and got to throw the switch himself.

The beam will run nightly from sunset to somewhere between midnight and 2 am. (This particular picture is from the architect's conception, and ran here when I visited the park on a Spottings tour this past summer. It was previously published by Downtown OKC.)

Montana Governor Brian Schweitzer was in Oklahoma this week. He gave an address at the National Congress of American Indians at the Tulsa Crowne Plaza, in which he said that the worst part of his job was consoling the survivors of fallen warriors.

Schweitzer has oil on his mind these days; he told the NCAI that the US has "140,000 troops in Iraq and we know why they are there. They are there because that is the corner of the oil production world." He also visited Syntroleum's coal-to-natural-gas conversion facility and got in a plug for Montana coal; Syntroleum suggested that synthetic-fuel plants could be built on-site at coal mines, eliminating the expense of hauling coal across the country to processing facilities.

There were rumors that Schweitzer has his eye on the White House, which he denied: "I have the best job in America," he said. "I'm not looking to go downhill."

Just what you don't need in your rear-view mirror: a Dodge Charger police cruiser, photographed in the very heart of Moparville: Auburn Hills, Michigan.

If it has the SRT-8 (425 hp) package, you're really screwed.

(Found at Jalopnik.)

All I can say is, Catholic schools certainly have changed since I was a student.

Although the really weird aspect of this, from my point of view, is not so much that the boys dressed up as girls — heck, even I've done that, and I'm not even marginally passable — but that they went through the whole blush-and-lip-gloss thing in fifth grade? Ten- and eleven-year-old girls are already blowing their allowances on Cover Girl?

(Via Andrea Harris, no big fan of that blush-and-lip-gloss thing herself.)

I'm coming up one of those infamous incredibly-short on-ramps with a built-in blind spot, and just emerging from said blind spot is your basic eighteen-wheeler. The usual response to this is simple enough: fourth to second, zoom to 6000 rpm, problem solved. At the end of this burst I'm usually doing 68 mph or so, which is faster than most truckers on this particular stretch.

And about two-thirds of the way up, there appears in the $200 lane a black and white Crown Vic with a light bar, the sort of apparition which discourages doing 68 mph or so, being as how the limit is 60.

Ultimately, it was easy: I can be compressed into a small polyhedron by a Kenworth, or I can take the chance that my next two words won't be "Hello, officer." And as it turned out, the man with the badge was rather anxious to get through the pattern himself, as his exit was coming up, so if he paid any attention to me at all, it was to make sure I wasn't actually in his path.

I suppose it's a good thing I still have enough in the way of driving reflexes to notice these situations, but still, it was an anxious moment or two.

Saith the Professor:

Have I got a car for him.

Mazda's Senku, a concept shown at the 2005 Tokyo Auto Show, is, by golly, a rotary rocket with a hybrid powertrain. Like the RX-8, it's a 2+2, but it's about nine inches longer, which matters if you insist on sitting in the back seat, and half of the glass roof contains solar panels which can be used to recharge the battery pack.

Were I ten years younger and ten times wealthier, I'd put this at the very top of my want list. By no coincidence, that describes the InstaMan perfectly.

There's an IRS Taxpayer Assistance Office in Harlem at 55 West 125th Street; the building is owned by Cogswell Realty (I always thought they made cogs), which is currently leasing another part of the building to a fellow who might know something about taxes: Bill Clinton.

What gets interesting here is that Cogswell is trying to refinance the building, and under New York law, the terms of tenants' leases must be disclosed to any potential investors. And the Clinton lease reportedly has two non-standard escape clauses: if Mrs Clinton runs for the Senate and loses, or if she runs for President and wins. Well, she's already run for the Senate, and she didn't lose.

A Clinton spokesperson says that the lease was drawn up by the General Services Administration and doesn't have anything unusual in it.

But they're off by a few inches.

First, a quote from House Speaker Dennis Hastert:

The mention of Pelosi is something of a cheap shot — it's not like anyone expects anything better from her — but otherwise, Hastert is spot-on.

Rather than focusing on the negatives, though, Sean Gleeson chooses to accentuate the positive: he's drafted an open letter to the Oklahoma House delegation, which, to its credit, voted 5-0 in favor of the measure.

(Thanks to The Steel Deal.)

Former Corporation for Public Broadcasting chairman Kenneth Tomlinson has resigned from the CPB board, possibly in expectation of an unfavorable finding by the CPB Inspector General, which has been investigating some of Tomlinson's spending on outside consultants.

Tomlinson came under fire earlier this year for what he described as attempts to correct political bias in PBS progamming; I speculated here that his real goal was to oversee the dismantling of CPB.

Don Danz proposes a new logo for the Tulsa World.

A Google search produces no results for norman trashwrap; yours truly gets the "I'm Feeling Lucky" treatment for oily dorklahoman.

Through the miracle of Photoshop, Dawn Eden finds the right guy.

This seems to be as good a time as any to deny that I have Harriet Miers on my speed dial.

Well, maybe not one, technically. Anyway, this is why Wendy keeps her cell phone tucked away neatly in the balcony:

Which makes perfect sense, if you think about it. (And it wouldn't apply to my rather lumpy Nokia phone, even if I had a place like this to put it, which I don't.)

No, I don't have her number. Why would you even ask such a thing?

Addendum, 12 November, 11 am: Jan the Happy Homemaker says that this works pretty well, sort of:

I was pretty good at geometry, but evidently not this good.

McGehee wants to know why anyone would read his blog.

The Top Ten reasons follow:

10. Has steadfastly refused to post pictures of the Olsen twins unclad

9. Posts more of an Atlanta Journal-Constitution article than ajc.com will let you read without giving them a two-page autobiography

8. Doesn't write essays about the need for people to floss more regularly for good dental health

7. A couple of my commenters think he's cool

6. His site has made me about B$1.1 million on BlogShares

5. Is way higher than I am in the Ecosystem, making it advisable for me to suck up

4. Did I mention the Olsen twins?

3. Is nearly as snarky in his posts as he is in his caption-contest entries

2. Stands firmly for telling Fulton County, Georgia to put a sock in it
   

And the Number One reason I read McGehee's blog:

1. It gives me one additional reason to want to buy him a beer
   

(Assuming, of course, he's allowed to have beer. You never know, these days.)

Rocketboom strikes back! Amanda Congdon (be still, my heart) offers some not-overly-dramatized examples of "crap comments" posted to the site. (Migod, she gets some horrid trollage.) Video, of course.

What did I know? I was just turning forty-eight:

(From Vent #268, 9 November 2001.)

For some reason, bits and pieces of this paragraph have been sitting in the back of my head for half my lifetime, and finally I got hold of the full text.

Original appearance: Car and Driver, October 1979, a column by editor David E. Davis, Jr. He's quoting, he says, "the smartest man in Detroit," who is otherwise unidentified — Frank Winchell? Bob Lutz? — on the subject of crash tests, and the dummies who have faith in them:

Of course, now we have a multiplicity of air bags, based on the notion that what you really need is not the ability to avoid an accident — it is an immutable law of the American road that anyone who promises to learn how to parallel-park some day can get a driver's license — but an explosion a few centimeters from your breastbone that drops the Sta-Puft Marshmallow Man in your lap. And nowadays, you can be ticketed for not fastening your seat belt, which is no different, qualitatively, from being fined for ordering extra mayo on your Whopper. (Not that I'd ever order any mayo on a Whopper, but this is an aesthetic issue, not a health issue, and if it becomes a health issue — well, I can only hope that my great-grandchildren, looking back on this period with all its stupidity and institutionalized superstition, will appreciate the fact that I was against everything.)

The Oklahoman's Jenni Carlson is pretty sure the Hornets will be back here next year:

Of course, things have a way of happening faster than usual when it comes to the Hornets — for an indication of just how fast, see Scott Cooper's cover story in last week's Gazette — but the factor here is not how fast Shinn's organization can move, but how fast New Orleans can be rebuilt. Says Carlson:

If you're thinking from this that C. J. Peete was otherwise functional before Katrina, think again: the Housing Authority of New Orleans started demolition in 1998. Things apparently don't move quite so quickly in the Big Easy.

Carlson concludes that a second year for the Hornets here in the Big Breezy is pretty much inevitable, and she's probably right, but what happens after that? Everybody — George Shinn, NBA Commissioner David Stern, Oklahoma City Mayor Mick Cornett — is absolutely positive that the Hornets will go back home.

Eventually.

Whenever that is.

Chris Sheridan of ESPN thinks two years is the limit:

So the real-life deadline, in effect, is January 2007. Certainly by then there will be substantial progress toward the restoration of New Orleans. Let's hope so, anyway.

Or other appendage as appropriate.

The last line of John Lennon's "Remember" (on Plastic Ono Band) is "Remember the 5th of November," a reference to the 1605 Gunpowder Plot against the British Parliament, spearheaded by Guy Fawkes.

For his part in the Plot, Fawkes was given what we might call "cruel and unusual punishment." Had this happened in 2005 instead of 1605, it wouldn't have happened that way at all:

God only knows what John Lennon would have said, had he survived.

(Via Tinkerty Tonk.)

Just to make one thing crystal clear: "Bob" in this Jacqueline Passey post is not me.

Really. It isn't.

(Nor did commenter David Alexander grow up to be me, either, in case that's occurred to you.)

About the time the city announced that they had plans to change some of the downtown one-way streets, there was a piece in the paper about how tourists, despite the newly-installed Wayfinder system, were still getting lost, and one person was quoted as saying that downtown streets simply didn't make sense.

As a thirty-year resident, I was inclined to blow off that claim, until this evening right around sunset when I caught just about every freaking traffic light, and sitting at every other light, it seemed, was some poor soul peering into a map.

And well, yeah, it's a grid, but it's not an intuitive grid. Generally throughout the city, streets run east and west, avenues run north and south, but downtown blows this scheme to hell. Starting at the 200 block South and heading north, you cross Reno Avenue, California Avenue, Sheridan Avenue, Main Street, Park Avenue, Robert S. Kerr Avenue, Dean A. McGee Avenue, and 4th Street. The dividing line between North and South is not Main, but Sheridan; Main, in the grand scheme of things, is a fairly insignificant street despite its name. And there's the perplexing block offset: the 400 block North is not, as you might expect, between 4th and 5th, but between 3rd Dean A. McGee and 4th. No mere Wayfinder can help with this.

About 5:55 I was at 8th and Lincoln (that's 900 Lincoln, by the way) and had the absurd idea of going down the two blocks to Stiles Park and watching them turn on the Big Green Light Saber, a notion for which I berated myself with a couple of iterations of "Do people with lives do this?" When I got there, there were half a dozen people already on hand, waiting for the throwing of the switch.

(Another paragraph starting with A. Do people with lives write like this?)

Hornets 91, Rockets 84, at Houston. Apparently the Bees can win on the road.

What's impressive here is that the Rockets had a six-point lead going into the fourth quarter, and held it for a few minutes more before the Hornets went on a berserk 17-2 run. What's more, five Hornets scored in double figures.

Next game is Wednesday at the Ford, against the Magic of Orlando.

In October 1964, Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel got their names — their real names, not the "Tom and Jerry" nom de disque they'd used for "Hey, Schoolgirl" back in the late 1950s — on an actual Columbia LP, titled Wednesday Morning, 3 A.M. Garfunkel, in the liner notes, suggested that there was a "major work" among the plaintive folk tunes: Simon's "The Sound of Silence," at the end of Side 1. The album did not chart, and the duo broke up, Simon departing for England for most of 1965.

Meanwhile, album producer Tom Wilson was pleased that "Sound" was getting some small amount of East Coast airplay, but worried that it wouldn't go beyond that. Folk itself, at least the part of it that was likely to get on the radio, was evolving into folk-rock, a process accelerated by two enormous hits: the Animals' British cover of the New Orleans ballad "House of the Rising Sun," and Bob Dylan's six-minute single "Like a Rolling Stone," which Wilson himself had produced.

With S&G more or less out of the picture, Wilson decided to consult neither; he took the original tape of "Sound," overdubbed a folk-rock rhythm section, and got Columbia to put it out as a single. Simon, by all accounts, was surprised to hear that he had a hit, and was even more surprised at how little it resembled the version he'd recorded. He reunited with Garfunkel, and they hurriedly assembled an album, inevitably titled Sounds of Silence, mostly from songs Simon had written for a UK-only release (The Paul Simon Song Book).

Billboard first took note of the "new" recording on 6 November 1965. By the New Year, it was on top of the Hot 100, where it remained for one week before being bumped by a new Beatles single ("We Can Work It Out"); however, the next week it was back to Number One again. The drawing power of "Sound" was so great that even the forgotten Wednesday album finally made the charts for the first time.

In the forty years since then, you've probably heard the rocked-up hit version more times than you can count. I know I have. But sometimes I'd just as soon hear the original, undubbed version, with just the two voices and Simon's guitar: to me, the simpler arrangement makes more sense for a song about alienation and despair.

Or maybe four eggs, one basket: Tulsa Mayor Bill LaFortune has tapped SMG to manage both the Tulsa Convention Center and the new BOK Center arena. SMG currently manages the Cox Convention Center and the Ford Center arena in Oklahoma City, which, says Michael Bates, could be a problem:

I have to assume LaFortune was thinking that unless he got a brand-name management firm, Tulsa wouldn't get any of these events at all. Still, I'm wondering if Tulsa, or for that matter Oklahoma City, wouldn't have been better served if he'd sought out an SMG competitor: having the four largest venues in the state under a single management strikes me as at least potentially counterproductive.

Addendum, 9:15 am, 7 November: Tulsa Councilman Chris Medlock notes that the major competition was Global Spectrum, a corporate affiliate of cable giant Comcast. And Comcast, as a cable giant, is a competitor to Cox Communications, which runs the Oklahoma City and Tulsa cable systems, which owns a piece of the Tulsa radio market, and which has its name on the wall at Oklahoma City's convention center, managed by SMG. Did Cox ever-so-subtly point this out to Bill LaFortune?

What with Monty introducing the Bride of the Leader of the Pack, I've got my mind on teenage death ditties today, and I'm declaring this thread open to discussion of same.

One observation: The songs recorded by the boys tended to be sweet and sentimental, while the girls went for the throat. (Even "Leader of the Pack" made no bones about eternal verities or anything like that; it was All Dad's Fault, and that was that.) The apotheosis of the latter phenomenon is "Nightmare," recorded by Lori Burton as the "Whyte Boots," the tale of a catfight turned literally lethal. Issued on Philips 40422 in 1967, it did not chart, perhaps because it was, like, too intense.

A few random favorites from the genre:

• Dickey Lee, "Patches" (Smash 1758, 1962)
  She lives on the wrong side of town, and when her boyfriend is barred from seeing her, she throws herself into the dirty old river that runs by the coal mine in Old Shantytown. Boyfriend vows to follow.

• Dickey Lee, "Laurie (Strange Things Happen)" (TCF Hall 102, 1965)
  Yeah, him again. Boy meets girl at dance, she borrows his sweater because it's cold, he eventually discovers that she's been dead for a year.

• The Shangri-Las, "Give Us Your Blessings" (Red Bird 10-030, 1965)
  Young couple want to get married, parental units say they're too young, couple runs crying from the room and drives off into the sunset, never seeing the sign that says DETOUR.

• Ray Peterson, "Tell Laura I Love Her" (RCA Victor 47-7745, 1960)
  Tommy can't afford a ring for his girl, so he enters a stock-car race to raise funds. He was, of course, the youngest driver there. Jeff Barry originally wrote this about a rodeo, but was persuaded to change the venue. Peterson also cut a version of "Give Us Your Blessings".

• The Everly Brothers, "Ebony Eyes" (Warner Bros. 5199, 1961)
  Young soldier gets just enough leave time to get married; to save time, she takes a plane to his duty station, but Flight 1203 never arrives.
  

And I didn't even mention "I Want My Baby Back", surely a sign of restraint.

Tell me what you want, what you really, really want:

So writes Michel Houellebecq in La poursuite du bonheur, and while it's controversial in some circles even to mention his name — in 2002, he opined to the French literary magazine Lire that while your major monotheistic religions were ultimately based on "texts of hate," Islam was the "most stupid," a statement which got him hauled before a French court for inciting racism, a charge which did not stick — what I've read of him reminds me very much of me: part romantic, part misanthropic, and never quite able to reconcile the two.

In a few months, an English translation of Houellebecq's novel The Possibility of an Island is due out, and its thesis is disturbing: the demand for sensuality has increased so much that actual satisfaction has become a remote possibility at best. Ariadne von Schirach writes in der Spiegel:

I find this prospect unutterably scary. It's no particular secret that I have loosened my leash, become more self-indulgent in recent years, and while my state of mind has "improved" (read: "become less despondent"), possibly as a result, the idea that I might be heading for full-fledged narcissism is chilling in the extreme. (We will ignore for the moment the idea that anyone with a blog is already a narcissist.) And I have written far too much already for the "Love, lack of" entry in the index; the last thing I need is more fodder for the topic.

But self-indulgence, at least in my case, does not equal hedonism, at least not yet. For one thing, I can't afford to be a hedonist: it requires financial commitments beyond my present capacity. More to the point, I wouldn't be a very good hedonist: I would never be able to persuade myself that I deserve what I'm getting. (This might reflect the not-inconsiderable influence of Jack Benny, who, accepting a prize of some sort, said "I don't deserve this award, but then I have arthritis and I don't deserve that either.")

Still, I don't hold myself so far apart from the rest of humanity that I can claim any immunity to its foibles, and if I'm destined to descend into Houellebecq's brave new world of self-absorption and disgruntlement, I want to know about it now, so I can take either countermeasures or drugs. Or both.

(Translation of the opening quatrain by Richard Davis. This piece was inspired, if that's the word — God forbid anyone should find any inspiration in what I write — by this post at doxology. Apologies to anyone whose vision and/or digestion was affected by the Spice Girls reference.)

David Aldridge writes in the Philadelphia Inquirer:

The Hornets aren't going to stay 18-64. (Last year, they won two of their first 31 games; this year, they've won two of their first three.) And there's already an indication that the Saints might be on the way out the door. I do, however, like Aldridge's idea that the NFL, which doesn't exactly have an abundance of Super Bowl sites, should assist with the Superdome repair and/or replacement.

As to the question of whether the Hornets should stay, I admit that right now, I'm more concerned with whether they beat the Orlando Magic Wednesday night.

(With thanks to Doug Loudenback.)

When I pay a bill, I write the check number and amount paid on it and throw it in a drawer, or I write the date it was paid through the bank's online-payment service and throw it in a drawer.

The common thread here is "throw it in a drawer," and as I was sealing up the payment for the utility bill, I discovered there was no room in said drawer. An examination of the contents revealed that I had stuff in there going back to October 2003, about the time I started planning the move to Surlywood.

I have a shredder, but it's only half-size — nothing over 4¼ inches wide — and no more than three sheets at once. Forty-five minutes later, I had a drawer only half full and about ten gallons (my usual kitchen bag allegedly holds thirteen) of what looked like underdone ziti. Presumably I'll have to do this again no later than the summer of '07.

Andrea Harris asks:

The answer:

1. No.
   
2. Hell, no.
   
3. No es posible, Señora.
   
4. All of the above.
   

No penalty for guessing.

These days, more frequent-flyer miles are earned by credit-card usage than by actually flying. With this in mind, Gary Leff offers suggestions at Marginal Revolution on what cards to carry and how to maximize your take.

(Via Jacqueline Passey.)

For some reason, I said this about Maureen Dowd last week:

Shed those Dowd-y feathers and fly a little bit? Maybe, maybe not. But the mind reels — at least, my mind reels — at the very idea that MoDo and I might have something in common. (And here's the complete reel.)

A couple of months ago, Ford Motor Company announced that it would spin off Hertz, its wholly-owned auto-rental unit, to a group of private investors.

Today Hertz chairman Craig Koch says he will step down as of the first of January because of a "family medical issue."

That's the first of January 2007.

The reader who pointed me to this story commented: "I wish I knew 14 months in advance when my family would have to deal with a 'medical issue'."

I don't know. I once left a job because of "mutual illness": I was sick of them, and they were sick of me.

Our man at The Clog Almanac is soliciting suggestions for reading material while we're quarantined with the bird flu.

First recommendation: Camus' La peste (The Plague).

A model of the human digestive system, knitted.

If the first thing you noticed was the color of the rectum, go to your room.

(Via Jan the Happy Homemaker.)

As always, these were actual queries that led to somewhere on this site.

free sheet music to the song entitled "this is the song that never ends": There isn't enough paper in the world to print it all out.

tips on being photogenic: Why in the world would anyone ask me that?

Novelty Songs: Article of clothing worn by little girl in Brian Hyland's chart-topper: It was a yellow polka-dot bikini, though not a particularly large one.

dancing in socks only: Insert "hardwood floor" joke here.

muslim babes shave every 40 days: Whether they need to or not?

weem away: Don't fear, my darling, the lion sleeps tonight.

did the vikings invent pizza in the 800s?: And if it wasn't delivered in 30 months, it was free.

rappers delight country version: The chicken tastes like mesquite, dammit.

chomsky leftish: It's true. Similarly, the Pacific Ocean is dampish.

Following up on this item, Fritz Schranck says:

I wouldn't be surprised. Rock critic Dave Marsh on "Leader of the Pack," circa 1989:

We felt so helpless; what could we do?

Which may explain why the genre mostly died after about 1965: with Vietnam a decidedly-unpleasant reality, fantasy deaths like these became superfluous. (The Shangs' actual war song, "Long Live Our Love," stiffed, so to speak.) The heat of battle overshadowed the Cold War; who cares about the Moody River, whose deadliness merely exceeds that of a knife, when the Eastern world, it is explodin'?

Three this month, says Lileks:

On the spectrum, I'm presumably closer to nutball right-winger than designated victim; on the other hand, I've always prided myself on being an equal-opportunity offender. (Political correctness? If it's political at all, it ain't correct.)

Still, if anyone happens to be setting up a foundation to lobby for the banning of the phrase "speak[ing] truth to power" from now until two days past eternity, I've got a check right here. Call it the whimsy of an old codger.

The volume of lies is increasing at somewhere between twice and 4.5 times the rate of inflation, depending on your choice of information sources; in fact, the volume is growing so quickly that sometimes you might wind up with something that isn't a lie at all.

As a public service, Sean Gleeson provides a handy flow chart to enable you to check these things directly.

That's me: a lump of coal under a lot of pressure.

Besides, canasta players will note that this card doesn't meld worth a damn.

Well, if somebody has to win in New Jersey, I hope it's this way:

You know, Delaware might actually object to this.

(Via E. M. Zanotti.)

Cam Edwards' Web site is sporting a spiffy new E. Webscapes design. Of course, I'm a sucker for retro-styled microphones; the most contemporary mike I own is thirty years old and won't even fit in a shirt pocket, let alone clip to one. (And yes, it works with the computer, but then the computer is four years old, which is about 147 in dog years.)

"Cold wax," to me, sounds like cold fusion: it might work in the lab, maybe, but God forbid you should try to replicate the experiment.

Just one excerpt:

I will, of course, take her word for it.

Oklahoma City has thirty-five fire stations, which sounds like a lot until you remember that the city covers more than six hundred square miles. Is this enough? Should some of them be moved?

Today, City Council decided to hire an outside consultant to evaluate the placement of OCFD stations and speculate as to where stations should be added or moved. One move is already planned: Station No. 4, at 100 SW 4th, will be relocated northeast of downtown, though it will be up to the consultant to recommend a location.

The consultant will be expected to come up with five-year and ten-year projections, and, says the Request For Proposals, "analyze the potential to provide Emergency Medical Service (EMS) transport from fire stations." The city currently has about twenty Advanced Life Support companies.

One thing I'd like to see which isn't specifically spelled out in the RFP is whether the city plans to upgrade its hazmat capacities.

Question from Sister Toldjah:

I'd be more likely to go after someone who didn't use both singular and plural pronouns to refer to the same person (cf. "If you love somebody, set them free" — Sting), but I don't think that's a political consideration.

Actually, I think I'm close enough to the center to be incompatible with both left and right. The real difference will be in fervor: someone of an activist bent will likely despair of my general indifference to all the hate and injustice in this world/all those damn Marxists running around loose [choose one].

I think, though, that for a long-term relationship, it's better if the couple is somewhere within the same chapter, if not necessarily on the same page.

Oklahoma Natural Gas Company offered (enrollment is now closed) a Voluntary Fixed-Price Plan which would freeze the price of gas to be delivered at $8.393 per dekatherm over the next year. I opted not to enroll, on the basis that I didn't think the price would be that high over an entire year: I expected a peak above that right away, but reasoned that it would subside in two or three months, as gasoline prices did and as diesel prices are starting to do. And besides, the price on my October bill was a mere $6.985. (The delivery fee is fixed and not included in these calculations.)

For the next twelve months, I'll calculate how much I've made, or lost, by choosing to reject this option. I start out behind:

• November: 2.4 used at $11.044; total price $26.51; VFP price $20.14; loss of $6.37.
  

We'll pick this up again this time next month. For the record, last winter's peak usage was billed in February: I used 10.4 Dth.

The complaints about wind turbines tend to focus on their presumed unsightliness and their Cuisinart-like impact on passing birds. A firm called Terra Moya Aqua Inc. has responded with a 90-degree turn: TMA's new turbine spins on a vertical axis, which allows for a lower tower and which birds don't seem to notice.

Even better, mounting the blades in a plane parallel to the ground apparently causes a lift effect on the back side to supplement the push effect on the front, which means, says TMA, at wind speeds above 5 mph, the turbine actually turns slightly faster than the wind.

If this thing works at all, and I can't think of any particular reason why it shouldn't, it might eventually supersede more conventional windmills, though I expect that the two types will coexist for a while — at least, until TMA's patents run out.

(Via Mister Snitch!)

And while you're at it, get Roy Orbison.

Only the lonely would come up with something like this, you say? Actually, they prefer pretty paper.

(Suggested by Dawn Eden.)

In Oklahoma City, the only numbered street that's also a section-line road on both north and south sides. (NW/NE 164th is also Edmond's 15th Street; SW/SE 164th becomes 34th Street on the south side of Moore.)

The 164th edition of Carnival of the Vanities is hosted by John Bambenek, Part-Time Pundit. The original weekly blog compendium just keeps rolling on.

I'll just let Matt Drachenberg tell it:

Since the two major motivations for blogging seem to be (1) the desire to Do Good and (2) the desire to see one's name all over the place, this scheme should draw lots of responses. At least, I hope it does.

Leave your bid in the Comments to Matt's original post.

State Representative Humus B. Kyddenme last month began drafting a bill for the 2006 session of the Legislature which would mandate the teaching of any and all creation stories which might be pertinent to state residents. With thirty-nine Native American tribes in some way connected to the state, it's possible that the first month of Biology I will be devoted entirely to them. In the Cherokee story, for instance, all the animals originally lived in the sky, above the water, and when the sky became too crowded, Dayuni'si, the water beetle, volunteered to explore what lay below. He found no solid ground, but did find mud at the bottom of the water; the animals attached strings to the corners, hauled the mud up to the surface, and waited for it to dry. (It was left for the wings of the great Buzzard from Galun'lati to finish the job.)

The discovery last week of a small traditional Egyptian community near Tahlequah made it necessary for Kyddenme to include their story as well. Atum, rising from Heliopolis (City of the Sun), produced Shu, the air, and Tefnut, moisture, by "copulating with his hand"; they, in turn, begat Earth and Sky by way of possibly more conventional methods. It's not likely that the state text will contain any illustrations of Atum's act of manipulation, though Rep. Thad Balkman might be able to help.

Chevrolet has put out a little twelve-page booklet which I found glued to the inside of one of the car mags this month. It's called MEN, WOMEN AND THE TRUCK, subtitled A RELATIONSHIP HANDBOOK, and the bow-tie boys have managed to work in just about any vehicle-related sexual stereotype you can think of. I mean, here's the opening: GIRLS PLAY WITH DOLLS. BOYS PLAY WITH TRUCKS. LET'S START THERE.

But the real winner is page 10, the last full page of text. It begins, yes, with all caps, LADIES, YOU'RE GOING TO OUTLIVE THE MEN ANYWAY.

If I hear of a copywriter in Detroit being run over by a Silverado driven by his wife, I'm going to assume it's the guy who wrote this.

The Hornets, trailing by one at the half, went totally cold in the third quarter, and didn't recover quite fast enough in the fourth; Orlando wins it, 88-83. Attendance was 18,508.

The Mavericks will be here Saturday, and it won't be on Cox 7.

That mouthful of Fifties populuxe jargon is, in fact, the official name for Buick portholes, which Donald Pittenger remembers fondly.

His larger point, though, is that General Motors has largely forgotten how to style its cars:

Cadillac, at least, has some distinct styling these days. But they'll never be able to explain how come four different brands (Chevy, Pontiac, Buick and Saturn) need a copy of the same indifferent minivan.

Traffic at this site is back up over the 1000-a-day mark this week, for no reason I can fathom.

Unless it's because the regulars (whoever they may be) know it's been more than a month since I did a post about squirrels.

I've seen the billboard. It claims that illegal immigrants cost this state $475 million a year, and yesterday it spurred a news story on KWTV, which I didn't see. The reader who pointed me to it complained, "[I]in my 22 years in Oklahoma City, I have never seen such a horribly biased story. Even though surveys show that illegal immigration is a top concern of the people of this state, you would never know it by this report."

So I went back and watched the story, and it didn't come off so much as biased as it did dismissive: the persons behind Oklahomans For Immigration Reform Now, which inexplicably is rendered as the acronym I.R.O.N., were basically given the back of the editorial hand. (They've posted a response to the story here.)

The Pew Hispanic Center guesstimates [link requires Adobe Reader] that there are between 55,000 and 85,000 "foreign-born persons" in Oklahoma "without proper authorization." Split the difference and call it 70,000. If you buy that $475 million figure in aggregate, that's $6785 a head. This seems more believable if you look at, say, the price of education: Oklahoma City Public Schools in 2004 were spending $5882 per student. But while there are certainly costs involved, there are also benefits: a cursory look down Commerce Street will tell you rather quickly that not all the money earned by illegals is being wired back to Mexico.

My own thinking is admittedly somewhat murky on this issue. Clearly our borders are entirely too porous, and some people we'd rather not have (gang members, the occasional terrorist) take advantage of this fact. On the other hand, people who simply want to work aren't my idea of a threat. And while rounding up seventy thousand people might have a certain visceral appeal, it's not going to happen — at least, not on George W. Bush's watch.

And inasmuch as ninety-something percent of Oklahomans have ancestors who were immigrants, I tend to think it's just a bit unseemly to complain about all those damn furriners. When we, as a nation, look at the new arrivals, and our first thought is not what they might bring to the table, but what they might take from the Treasury, we've changed, and not for the better.

A few moments later: Does this mean I think we ought to leave everyone alone and ignore the situation? No. "Out of sight, out of mind" results in stories out of France. But I have a great deal of trouble with the idea of discriminating against people who want to work, especially when we have entirely too many people who don't.

Jessica Alba, last unseen (here, anyway) as the Fantastic Four's Invisible Woman, seems to think she's being typecast:

Well, okay, but would it be a bad thing if it were happening to Natalie Portman?

(Via Fark)

Not from the Sisters Grimm:

Moral of the story: Martinis give you gas. Or something like that.

File under "too much to hope for":

"No idea" describes me often enough, but she's definitely not talking about me here.

This is, however, not all that far from my own benchmark. I have a tendency to throw in vague cultural references, obscure bits of text, and a (half-)vast number of puns, and if someone picks up on more than 50 percent of the aggregate, I am duly impressed. (I'm surprised when I understand half of what I say sometimes.) There remains the issue of why someone that smart would want anything to do with me, but I'll deal with that in the unlikely event that it actually comes up.

And if we must mock Hello Kitty, let it be for the bedroom appliances.

This looks like it has potential:

The following have come to mind:

• Solitary Refinement
  
• Love in the Time of Cauliflower
  
• Daisy Petals: Divisible by Two
  
• Blocked by Google Print
  
• Wednesday's Child Is Put Up for Adoption
  
• 500 Internal Server Error
  
• The Agony and the Eczema
  

It will, of course, be hard to choose.

(Via this ass-kickingly-cute Midwestern sports dyke.)

Jonah Goldberg digs into the veggies and reports:

The same holds true in clothing: it may feel like silk, it may look like silk, but you'll know it's polyester, and you will be despondent when you wear it.

And how similar a simulacrum, anyway?

Well, yes, I suppose it would.

Still, to borrow a fin from Charlie the Tuna, do we want our garlic-frittered homunculi to have good taste, or do we want them to taste good?

Last spring, I wrote up a paragraph about 324 North Robinson, the erstwhile Braniff Building, going to waste in the New Downtown.

No longer. Kerr-McGee, owner of the building, is going to have 324 and two buildings around the corner on Robert S. Kerr converted to medium-to-high-buck condos.

The oldest and smallest of the structures is 111 Robert S. Kerr, built in 1902 as the India Temple and originally designated 101 W. 2nd Street. The Shriners moved out around 1909 and the building became known as the Wright Building. The biggest of the three is 135 Robert S. Kerr, which dates to 1921, and which served Kerr-McGee as corporate headquarters from the 1940s until the early 1960s.

Architect Anthony McDermid first proposed the condo conversions to a Mayor's Conference in 2002; he says one difficulty will be pulling the concrete front off 111 and restoring the original surface.

The three buildings cover 270,000 square feet; only about 70 residences will be built, suggesting that they will be very large and presumably pricey.

I have a great deal of trouble with the idea that I now have a grandchild six years old; it just seems so impossible, you know? And yet he was five years old a year ago, four years old two years ago, and so on down the line, in strict compliance with the laws of mathematics.

Oh, well. Happy birthday, Nick. Now cool it for a moment so your mom can get some sleep, okay?

(Aside to someone else born on this date: How is it that he ages one year every twelve months and you age one year every twelve years?)

As Jayne Says:

How true this is.

(Via A Sweet, Familiar Dissonance.)

Matt Rosenberg, proprietor of the fine Rosenblog and an ongoing friend of this screwy little site, has a commentary at City Journal, in which he asks, "Why do white liberals accept the 'gangsta' persona as a perfectly legitimate expression of black culture?"

I think David "Clubbeaux" Sims had a substantive point:

Well, maybe relative garbage.

My comment at the time:

This was, of course, nearly three years ago; since then, people have taken pains to remind me that most of that stuff is in fact bought by white boys.

Someone asked Jeeves this: How can I find out if my ex-husband is alive if he died before the age of 65?

I'm not Jeeves, or any kind of expert on these matters, but it seems to me that if he died before the age of 65, there's a good chance he's, um, still dead.

(I know this because Jeeves sent her here.)

Robert Greenwald's documentary Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Prices will be screened in Fellowship Hall at Mayflower Congregational Church in Oklahoma City this Sunday; however, apparently all the available space has been reserved. Mayflower's Dr Robin Meyers talks about the film here.

Other area screenings will be in Piedmont and at UCO in Edmond on Monday; two scheduled for Norman are reportedly at capacity already. The production company offers a Web tool to find screenings in your neck of the woods. Of course, they wouldn't object if you bought a copy on DVD.

December 1974. I'm standing in a metal building on the side of a hill, and "heat" is a concept I'm trying to put out of my mind. There's no snow yet, but the wind is blowing about 35 mph from the frozen North, and I've already been advised to keep the water running, lest the pipes freeze. "Water," in this context, refers to the utility sink; there is no actual latrine. Fortunately, there is lots to do, and as the ancient mimeograph spins, the temperature rises a degree or so. A couple of hours, and I'll have all these orders finished and out to distribution.

The Army considered this post a "hardship" tour: one year, generally, and don't even think about bringing your dependents. In 1974, though, there were plenty of other soldiers who were enduring far greater hardships than I was. And while my job was much shorter on dramatic potential — I had a weapon, but it was unlikely I'd be called upon to use it, even on guard duty — I knew we were all in this together, whatever "this" happened to be. "When the time comes," Sergeant Irions had said, "we're all Eleven Bravo."

Three decades later, that phrase still sticks in my mind. We all had our specialties — I had been a 71B clerk, then got spun off into 75C personnel management — but if the barbarians actually showed up at the gate, I wouldn't be fighting them with a typewriter: ol' Seventy-Five Charlie would be toting a rifle with the rest of them.

At that time, I'd had a weapon pointed at me just once: by the Italians, at Fiumicino Airport in Rome. The Carabinieri were waiting for our Pan Am flight, and ordered us off the premises; I later heard that someone had phoned in a bomb threat to FCO, and all incoming flights were getting similar treatment. I wasn't exactly thrilled, but I didn't panic, and that memory was worth something as I loaded more paper into the mimeo and fought off a shiver.

It's still worth something today, thirty years after I left the Middle East, eighty-seven years after the Armistice that ended the World War. (Little did anyone suspect in 1918 that there would soon be another World War, worse than the first.) Fear, left unchecked, eats the soul. The soldier acknowledges that fear, and presses on regardless. For that, and for so much more, we thank him on this day.

(Submitted to Outside the Beltway's and La Shawn Barber's Veterans Day roundups.)

The Oklahoma City branch of the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City will be shutting down check and cash processing functions — these will be shifted to Dallas along with about 130 jobs — and will sell off its downtown building at 226 Dean A. McGee in favor of smaller leased quarters.

The remaining Fed staff will concentrate on analysis and projections. One question unanswered: will banks whose checks were processed through the Oklahoma City branch change their routing numbers? Dallas is in the 11th District, Kansas City the 10th, and the first two digits have always indicated the district. (Oklahoma banks are 1030 through 1039 or 3030 through 3039; should the numbers change, presumably they would change to something in the 1100s or 3100s.)

I'd never given any thought to it, and Lynn probably wishes she'd never given any thought to it; I have no doubt she could have done without the visuals.

Five-word summary: "concealed carry at nudist camp". Any more than that and I'll have to figure out some way to offer downloadable Pepto-Bismol® or something.

Now that would be one hell of a drink, if it existed; but it's just a combination of random words that wound up as the subject to yet another email stock tout. The actual text was sent as a GIF file, which is always annoying. For your amusement, I reprint the last paragraph, to the extent I can decipher 5-point type:

In this case, it's being used for entertainment.

Johnny Tanner has died. The last surviving original member of the seminal R&B group The "5" Royales — despite the name, often a six-man group, hence the quotation marks — Tanner sang lead on dozens of records, though his brother Eugene took the lead on perhaps their best-known crossover hit, 1958's "Dedicated to the One I Love," later covered to brilliant effect by the Shirelles.

The Royales' breakthrough record was "Baby Don't Do It," recorded for Apollo Records in late 1952; it spent three weeks on top of the R&B charts in the spring of 1953. Like most of the Royales' hits, it was written by guitarist (and bass vocal) Lowman Pauling, who died in 1973.

After leaving the Royales in 1963, Tanner returned to his gospel roots, and stayed there for the rest of his life. It was bone cancer that finally felled him this past Tuesday, at age 78, in the group's hometown of Winston-Salem, North Carolina, where there's a Five Royales Drive at the north end of Main Street.

Dave Simpson, picked up as editorial cartoonist by the Tulsa World after the closing of the rival Tribune in 1992, was sacked by the World this week: a June cartoon he drew was apparently a blatant copy of a 1981 Bob Englehart cartoon published in The Hartford Courant.

Simpson said he had a copy of the cartoon in his files, unsigned, and thought it was one of his own.

World publisher Robert Lorton said that the paper would begin a review of its journalistic standards; Tulsa political writer Michael Bates is expected to stop laughing by mid-December.

One of Victoria's worst-kept secrets: