Reportedly, this comes from the Policy and Procedures Manual of the Tulsa Police:

I'm just cynical enough to wonder how much of this is wanting to avoid trespassing on BCIS' turf — these are Federal laws, after all — and how much of it is wanting to avoid confrontation with open-borders advocates.

On the upside, now we know that overstaying one's student visa is "deplorable."

(Via Meeciteewurkor.)

Governor Henry introduces the Oklahoma Centennial Stamp, to be issued next January:

(Photo by the Oklahoman's Nate Billings, from the AP wire. Inexplicably, this wasn't to be found at NewsOK.com.)

News Item:

Senator Barbara Boxer (D-CA) is "dismayed":

I can appreciate Boxer's dismay: whatever the alleged benefits of media consolidation, they are, I think, outweighed by the inevitably higher level of media homogenization that results.

The report claims that locally-owned stations put on more news:

Of the major-network affiliates in Oklahoma City, only one can be construed as "local": KWTV, the CBS outlet, owned by Griffin Communications LLC, whose holdings include two other stations, both in Tulsa. I avoid watching TV news as a general rule — bad for my dyspepsia — but if there's any indication that News 9 (or Tulsa's The News on 6) actually put on more news than their competitors, I'd like to hear about it. (And if there isn't, I'd like to hear about that too.)

(Disclosure: Yours truly was once interviewed by News 9. Good thing it wasn't twice.)

Last year, Michael Clingman, secretary of the state's Election Board, expressed some interest in acquiring some touch-screen voting machines, apparently thumbing his nose at the ancient wisdom, "If it ain't broke, don't fix it." At the time, I suggested that this was at least partially motivated by the desire to get the Feds to pay for the odious devices.

Steven Roemerman has now spoken with Clingman about the future of voting contraptions in Oklahoma, and I am somewhat reassured:

And with good reason, too, given the unreliability demonstrated by the most popular electronic voting machine.

I grumbled back in July that Dana Orwig, Democratic candidate for House District 87, didn't have a Web site, and when she dropped by the palatial Surlywood estate, I asked her about that.

Now she does, which puts her one up on her opponent this fall. (VoteWorthen.com comes up 404 at this writing.) Issues she's supporting are here.

I like big developments as much as the next guy — unless, of course, the next guy is the one who plans to make his fortune on them — but for those of us who aren't in the real-estate game, it's the small stuff that makes an inner-city area more interesting and more livable.

Michael Bates offers a case in point: the Gypsy Coffee House in Tulsa's Oldtown. The name comes from the long-defunct Gypsy Oil Company, whose building was boarded up in the 1970s and more or less abandoned.

New owner Bradley René Garcia took over on the last day of 1998 and faced a massive task: there were interior walls to remove, leaks to fix, amenities to install. It took six months to get to the point where he could start building what he wanted.

Still, it's paying off. The second floor is now occupied by a salon; the coffee house is open weeknights until midnight, Friday and Saturday until 3 am. Says Garcia:

We do need the big guys with the vast visions; but we need folks like Mr Garcia, devoted to the smaller things, just as much.

Rep. Dan Boren is the lone Democrat in the state's Congressional delegation, and his voting record is not exactly typical of Democrats in Congress; after speculation at The Hill that Boren might jump to the Republican side of the aisle, the Oklahoman revealed today Boren had told them last week he had no such plans.

"There's not a chance that I would ever change parties," said Boren, though he admitted that he had registered as an Independent during a period when he was working for Corporation Commissioner Denise Bode, a Republican who sought a Congressional seat of her own this year.

I feel for the guy. I twitch at some of the things national Democrats come up with, but I have no reason to think I'd feel any more comfortable were I to throw in my lot with the GOP.

Those wonderful bloggers of ours.

If you don't blog, but you think you might like to, come anyway: at 1 pm there will be a 90-minute Blogging 101 workshop, led by the eminent Sean Gleeson, which is free to the general public, though space is limited.

The bash is at the Bricktown Central Plaza Hotel, Reno at Martin Luther King, east of downtown — and no, not actually in Bricktown.

Update, 12:45 pm: The crowd is starting to filter in, and of course we prefer our crowds filtered.

The 2006 Okie Blogger Bash continues, even as I type, and the Awards have been given. Very good turnout, and a lot of deserving winners.

Me? Um, I was the last one anybody mentioned.

Congratulations to all the nominees.

Update, 10:10 pm: Don Danz has all the details.

Oh, and Monty? Serious voluptuosity.

Well, I suppose he is kinda cute, and if nothing else, I learned never to use the top of the range as a backdrop for a photo. (Note: I have replaced the original photo in this piece with Folger's Crystals a better one found at Okiedoke, shot by the intrepid Don Danz.) A dozen of these were handed out last night; I got the twelfth. (For the record, either three or four of my picks won their respective categories.) As for the rumors that I was seen on the actual dance floor, well, I plan to claim that all 15 or 20 people who have photographic evidence of the incident are buying material from AP and Reuters stringers and therefore you can't believe a word of it. (And anyway, Kurt Hochenauer is a better dancer.) I wonder if Dwight and Sarah have yet discovered that they're each entitled to 0.5 duck. And somewhere in the midst of it all, I asserted that this was my Best. Post. Ever. Nobody agreed.

Chris Casteel of the Oklahoman's Washington bureau (I mention this in case some of you had no idea the Oklahoman even had a Washington bureau) talked to the state's Congressional delegation about the possibility of a Democratic resurgence sufficient to regain the majority.

Dan Boren, the lone Democrat in the bunch, took a collective view:

Those who consider Boren a DINO, I suspect, will continue to do so.

John Sullivan echoed Boren's concerns about clout, but was confident the Democrats would come up just short of winning control. Tom Cole worries about seniority: the average House member, he says, has 11 years in, and with Ernest Istook departing, only Frank Lucas comes even close to that.

And Lucas admits he enjoys his chairmanship of an Agriculture subcommittee:

Meanwhile, in the Senate, Tom Coburn, Scourge of Pork, isn't worried about losing his subcommittee:

The Big Spenders are herewith put on notice.

Predictions from yours truly, as posted New Year's Day: Republicans lose 13 seats in the House, two in the Senate, but retain a (thinner) majority.

Frosty Troy has been running the Oklahoma Observer for so long it's hard to remember when he wasn't. But Frosty is well into his seventies, and he announced a couple years ago that he was looking for someone to succeed him as editor.

Now he's found someone. The Dallas Morning News, in a cost-cutting move, is apparently shuttering its Oklahoma bureau, freeing up Arnold Hamilton to take over at the Observer.

Hamilton grew up in Midwest City, and got some of his earliest bylines at the late, lamented Oklahoma Journal. I remember him as a non-flashy, rock-solid reporter type, and I wasn't surprised to see his name in a Dallas paper after the Journal died. The News apparently is buying him out for about a year's salary; Troy says he'd been trying to talk Hamilton into the Observer position for a number of years.

On the masthead, Hamilton and his wife Beverly are now listed as editor and publisher respectively, Frosty and Helen Troy moving to "founding editor" and "founding publisher." This isn't strictly accurate — the first incarnation of the Observer was a church publication that was in danger of going under — but no one except the Troys would be likely to remember those days anyway, and certainly they deserve the credit for keeping the paper viable for thirty-odd years. Arnold Hamilton has a hard act to follow, but I'm sure he's up to the task.

When last we checked in with Rep. Humus B. Kyddenme, he was pitching a House bill to include all known creation stories in the state-mandated public-school curriculum; to his chagrin, the bill never emerged from committee.

For next year, he has a new idea. Noting that population growth has been consistent along America's coastlines, and that the demand for housing has kept property values sky-high in those areas, Kyddenme has decided that landlocked Oklahoma can't compete unless it has a serious shoreline.

Bricktown Beach, despite its name, will not actually be located in Bricktown; the massive artificial ocean, about 185 square miles, will be created by flooding the northeastern quarter of Oklahoma County, roughly everything east of Sooner Road and north of NE 36th Street. (The famed Round Barn in Arcadia, which would otherwise be sunk, will be trucked up Old 66 to a new location west of Chandler.) Tides will be created by wind turbines placed at regular intervals along Pottawatomie Road; as a bonus, they will generate electricity for 3,000 homes in Lincoln County. Kyddenme hasn't given a cost estimate, but he insists that the revenue from the hotels, casinos and restaurants located along the shore will easily cover the expense of digging a two-thousand-foot-deep hole thirteen and a half miles square. As for the 30,000 or so displaced residents, Kyddenme says there's no problem: "Who do you think is gonna buy all those beach houses?" It's no more implausible, he says, than building artificial islands in the middle of the Arkansas River.

The headline in the Mid-City Advocate read:

First thought: "Omigod, what's Brenda done now?"

(The Surly Grammarian suggests a hyphen between "illegal" and "immigration.")

TulsaNow says the Oil Capital has enough asphalt, and has a map to prove it: for instance, Cincinnati between 10th and 13th is an almost-uninterrupted stretch of parking lots.

From the CORE proposals [link to PDF file]:

We hear the same noises in Oklahoma City, particularly regarding Bricktown. I have never had any trouble finding a place to park downtown, even during big events like the Festival of the Arts, which draws something like 100,000 people a day, but no one believes me. More to the point, downtown activities continue to draw crowds, which should tell you that parking isn't that much of an issue at all.

A view from Indianapolis by Aaron Renn:

It's as simple as this, says Renn:

To get people into the city center, for a few hours or for the rest of their lives, you've got to give them something they want. Oklahoma City, after years of downtown desuetude, finally has a handle on the idea that they have to offer an experience that can't be had in Edmond or Yukon or Moore. And an irreplaceable part of that experience is the connection to history that exists only in those classic buildings with their inimitable architecture. (Edmond is busily sprucing up its old downtown, precisely for this reason.)

Michael Bates has a seven-minute video put together by TulsaNow to illustrate their point. But Joni Mitchell saw this coming decades ago: before the pink hotel, the boutique, or the swinging hot spot, they put up a parking lot. Then, as now, we don't know what we've got 'til it's gone.

Former Attorney General John Ashcroft will be in town next week: he'll be signing copies of his new book Never Again. And this book might draw rather a lot of interest locally, since one of the chapters is titled "The Botched Prosecution of Timothy McVeigh."

Nolan Clay reports in the Oklahoman:

The prosecution was not impressed:

Not all of the public was so assured.

Ashcroft also noted that he was concerned about McVeigh's post-execution reputation:

In that, at least, they were successful: the only mentions McVeigh gets these days are from apologists for Islam, who are anxious to point out that McVeigh, unlike ninety-nine-point-something percent of modern-day terrorists, was not in fact a Muslim.

Ashcroft will be appearing at the Wal-Mart Supercenter (!) in Edmond on Wednesday, 11 October, at noon. Note to women: you might want to be careful with the cleavage.

Lynn is tired of those [word redacted] snakes coming up through the bathroom:

Complain? Not me. Here's why:

Sheesh. Even Kate has sworn off venom.

Michael Bates argues that the Tulsa Airport Authority should drop its $9.95-a-day fee for wireless Internet at Tulsa International, and there are good reasons to do so:

Besides, it's something we don't have in Oklahoma City (though the going rate at Will Rogers is two bucks less). Still, I must ruefully concede the point of commenter RJJ, who said:

Probably not. In 1955, the legislature passed a law which said that so long as any bonds were outstanding on any state turnpike, no turnpike could be turned into a free road. And inasmuch as the Turner, the prototype for all such projects, contained a provision that allowed for refinancing those bonds — well, don't hold your breath waiting for the toll plazas to go away. It is true that there ain't no such thing as a free lunch; in this state, though, you might be well advised to bring your own napkins as well.

Earlier this week (in Vent #505) I came out in favor of all four state questions on this year's ballot, though I was least enthusiastic about SQ 725, which allows the state's Rainy Day Fund to be tapped to rescue failing manufacturing plants.

What I said was something like this:

Not the most enthusiastic of endorsements, but there it is.

Mike has no such reservations. He doesn't like it at all:

Considering the Governor and the leaders of both houses have to sign off on any such incentives, I don't think there's too much danger of rushing into these things.

On the other hand, this is indisputably true:

Which is, of course, a disadvantage of any government program that writes checks: people will queue up to get it whether they need it or not.

And if SQ 725 turns out to be more boondoggle than boon, well, Mike told you (and me) so.

This is the last day of the state's tattoo ban — as of tomorrow, practitioners can operate legally within the state, subject to (as always) state regulations.

Not everyone is happy about it. Rep. John Wright (R-Broken Arrow) says it's bad for the state's economy:

Indeed. Remember when Ken Lay chewed out Jeff Skilling for that "Born to Steal" scroll on his upper arm?

Actually, it was a pretty good day to be an Oklahoma incumbent: of the statewide officeholders, only Labor Commissioner Brenda Reneau was sent packing. More interesting is the apparent 24-24 tie in the state Senate, in which case Lt. Governor-elect Jari Askins, a Democrat, will hold the balance of power. (Senator Nancy Riley, who switched to the Democrats earlier this year, might well congratulate herself on her prescience.) The GOP still holds the House, though.

All the State Questions passed, although the only one that was never in doubt was 724, which cuts off state pay to an officeholder in jail, and which passed with better than a 7-1 margin.

I've seen no recount requests yet. If there are no challenges, the State Election Board will certify the results (current totals here) next Wednesday.

All in all, I can't complain with any degree of conviction: most of the folks I voted for actually won, which is far better than my usual track record, and it looks like I can retire my Big Book of Thad Balkman Jokes.

(Oh, and my predictions? Not so close.)

Right out of the paper, simply because I like the way this sounds:

You want to know why I voted for Jari Askins for Lieutenant Governor and Tie-Breaker? Because Todd Hiett wouldn't have thought this was so damn funny.

NewsOK.com usually has the weather radar at this link.

This morning, though, they had this.

Frosty Troy's Oklahoma Observer now has a Web site, and it looks pretty good, if a trifle short of content just yet. (This has to be Arnold Hamilton's idea.) Whether this will help Observer circulation, which has been sitting around 7500 for as long as I can remember, remains to be seen, but I'm sure it's worth the effort.

I drove past Keith Smith's house yesterday, which is nothing unusual, since it's near my house. At the time, I had no idea that he wasn't there.

Turns out that Smith, one of the founders of Central Oklahoma's Stonewall Democrats, and the party's first openly-gay delegate to the national Democratic convention, had died Monday night, a victim of pneumonia, at Integris Baptist Medical Center. The Smith Group, which he headed, had established itself as a major player in Oklahoma's progressive politics: Smith represented many left-of-center groups, not all of them GLBT-related.

Family services will be in Smith's hometown of Alva; there will be a memorial at the Capitol on the first of December.

File this under Historical Inevitability: you can now get the B. C. Clark jingle on iTunes.

What's more, Oklahoma's Oldest Jeweler is presenting a collection of versions from the last thirty-odd years, including the original unexpurgated version. (Old Clarkies will remember that there used to be one extra line in the song, snipped when 30-second spots became the rule rather than the exception.)

The original jingle dates back to 1956, which means it's been around longer than "Jingle Bell Rock" ('57), the Chipmunk Song ('58) or "The Little Drummer Boy" ('58, though its Czech ancestor dates back to WWII).

Mercifully, no one recorded this version for posterity.

From Oklahoma Statutes, title 15, section 598.3:

And how is "cost" defined in this act? See the previous section:

Which explains how it is that a woman from an Oklahoma town, having seen a national Wal-Mart ad for an RCA 52-inch TV for $474, was told that she'd have to pay $699 for it — or, alternatively, take a drive up to Missouri, which has no such law.

It's such a comfort to know that the state cares enough to protect you from the horror of excessively-low prices.

That's what it says on her MySpace Music page.

One thing she has in abundance, though, is perspective. I found this on her MySpace blog:

I should point out here that I didn't see this until after I'd bought Shannon's self-released CD Brainstorms, which contains 11 songs that are at least slightly meaningful and definitely catchy. And she would have won me over just from the chorus of "Don't Be Beautiful":

It probably doesn't help her cause that she lives "a drama-free, abnormally normal life," which is seriously déclassé these days: a surprisingly-large number of people seem to crave All Angst, All The Time. Not I. Shannon Thomas is way young — I probably have dinnerware older than she is — but she's made a fan of me.

(Oh, and on Brainstorms, the sticks — and the other instrumentation, except for Shannon's piano — are wielded by John Conrad of Self-Titled Entertainment in Tulsa. And Conrad plays a pretty good drum, even if it's digital.)

It doesn't happen too often — air masses don't always move quickly — but now and then, if you pay attention, you can actually see a front coming through.

For that matter, you can hear it too. I was standing in my driveway about six-thirty this morning. The temperature was around 62 degrees, with a not-quite-brisk southerly wind keeping it way warmer than average. And above all the city noises there was this indefinable roar, seemingly from out of nowhere.

The trees, mostly bare by now, stopped quivering in the breeze. The roar grew louder, and louder still. A handful of leaves along the curb began rattling. More joined in. The trees started up again, this time faster. And a shot of cold Canadian air hit me square in the back, reminding me that I'd be well-advised to go get a jacket.

The temperature has dropped about 25 degrees in the hour since, and rain has started. They tell us that eventually that rain will mutate into something nasty and frozen. None of this is unusual, particularly; but unless you're a storm spotter or a major weather geek (I'm a few clicks short of the latter, I think), you simply shrug and go on, knowing that whatever is about to happen, you can't do anything about it anyway.

I approach all Winter Weather Events with trepidation, just on general principle, especially since the forecast seems to change hourly. (If you were wondering why we have so many climate-change skeptics here in the middle of the country, it's simple: we've learned to expect the unexpected, although not the unexpected we expected.) *

Further apprehension arises when I note that this will be the first time on slick and nasty stuff with my overpriced semi-luxury sled. It's up to the turn-of-the-century standards that prevailed for that model year, but I have no reason to believe that it in any way advances the state of the art.

One thing that helps is that the freezing drizzle we were told to expect either didn't materialize or never made it to the ground, so while there were a few slick patches around the neighborhood, it was nothing to worry about.

Things got worse heading eastward, though I-44 was passable at 45-50 mph and I-35, with much more traffic, moved along in the lower 40s. The sleet, which was just starting to fall when I left home, was coming down briskly by the time I got to 42nd and Treadmill. For now, they've scaled back the 3-to-7-inches prediction to about half that, though they've added another inch after dark, when things were supposed to be tapering off.

And I'd rather drive on snow than on little ice pellets anyday.

* Yes, I suppose this is rather Rumsfeldian.

The Forecast Discussion on weather.gov is always fascinating, because it's so much more informal than the actual forecast itself; they will explain why they came up with this part of the forecast, or what models they were using to predict it, or the rationale for issuing, say, a warning instead of an advisory.

The current FD for the NWS branch in Norman is here. I excerpt the following from the just-before-noon edition:

I do dislike that word "blizzard," especially since I no longer have a Dairy Queen nearby.

For the first time in recent memory, 42nd and Treadmill shut down early, and I got to play in the road snow, which is always a thrill, in the sense that throwing yourself off a cliff is a thrill for the first 90 percent of the trip. I did follow my normal snow-travel protocol, which involves staying in third gear as much as possible on the freeway and second gear on surface streets. Gwendolyn, bless her little Japanese heart, was unexpectedly sure-footed, and even made it up the rather steep slope of the driveway to Surlywood on the first try with minimal wheelspin, something my last car didn't do so well. Travel time for the normally-18-minute run was only 28 minutes, which I consider a moral victory.

Of course, it's going to be worse tomorrow, at least until the sun comes out, and the predicted high is barely above freezing.

The Help America Vote Act of 2002 made some people suspicious, including me. And it didn't help when the Oklahoma State Election Board put out an RFP for a "Telecommunications-based Statewide Voting System" earlier this year.

A LiveJournal member, curious, wrote the OSEB and asked what was up, and was told:

And that "telecommunications-based" system? Here's how it works:

I believe this calls for a "Yay us!"

(Via Batesline.)

Governor Henry, noting that there was a heck of a lot of snow last week, has canceled the burn ban for the four counties where it was still in effect.

This is not to say that we're permanently off the hook:

And it's not like we're out of the drought or anything: we're still running 20-25 percent below normal on rainfall here in the middle of the state, and other areas aren't doing even that well.

Sarah's still waiting for the Most Wonderful Day of the Year:

There's only one thing that can put a stereotype out of its misery: the counterexample. Nothing silences "They all do that" faster than someone who doesn't do that. We don't have a lot of blue-state girls? Be a blue-state girl. And be unapologetic about it. There's a strong populist streak here, and always has been. (Two words: "Woody Guthrie.") And if someone from distant Stuffy Heights says "You're from Oklahoma? I never would have guessed," you've done your part. Next time he'll think twice before spouting off like, um, an intolerant moron.

One more thing: don't worry about the "twang." We were not put on this earth to sound like network-news correspondents.

And now, back to your regularly-scheduled reindeer games.

I once suggested that a Banana Republic store might be a good fit for Bricktown, and people looked at me as though I were proposing to tear down the Acropolis and replace it with a Long John Silver's. "There's one in Utica Square," I argued, but nobody wanted to hear about things that worked in Tulsa; the No Chains sign is up.

And that's not necessarily a good thing, says Virginia Postrel:

And yet we want those stores; we just don't want those names on them.

The argument is always "It would put our local retailers out of business," even if we have no such local retailers.

Meanwhile, the IHOP in the middle of Bricktown flourishes.

Worried that you didn't have enough to worry about? We should now start sweating public-health disasters:

Well, we are better prepared, at least in this neck of the woods. On the Trust's ten criteria, only Oklahoma got passing grades for all ten. Kansas got 9; the lowest scores were 4's and 5's.

Dr. Mike Crutcher, commissioner of the Department of Health, cautions that this year's commendable showing is but "a snapshot in time"; there is always work to be done.

Somebody among the Democrats will face James (he's just not a Jim to me) Inhofe for that Senate seat in 2008, and so far, all we know is that it won't be Brad Henry.

The McCarville Report Web site is surveying the possibilities, and as of yesterday, the front-runners — very close together — were State Senator Jay Paul Gumm, AG Drew Edmondson, and District 1 Representative Dan Boren. Fourth was Tulsa Mayor Kathy Taylor.

A 2003 Oklahoma tort-reform measure required persons filing medical-malpractice lawsuits to obtain an affidavit from an expert stating that in his opinion the case had merit. The idea, said proponents, was to discourage frivolous suits.

The state Supreme Court, by an 8-1 vote, has now stricken this particular provision, finding several things wrong with it. For one, the affidavit had to be obtained by the plaintiff at his own expense; for another, it applied only to medical negligence and not to any other form of negligence; for yet another, this:

While I worry about costs as much as the next guy, I won't miss this piece of misguided law: its underlying assumption, that all suits are frivolous until proven otherwise, is both insupportable and insulting.

OK Blue Notes is polling state Democrats on their Presidential preference for 2008. At this writing, Wesley Clark (!) has the lead; John Edwards and Barack Obama follow; the rest (including my own current choice, which is subject to change) are way back. Unlike most of the online polls I've seen, this one can apparently take write-ins.

J. M. Branum has a new project: the Oklahoma Wiki, and it's intended to go beyond the information available at, say, Wikipedia, where, he says, "some of the more interesting topics are often not covered or are even censored by the editors."

It will be interesting to see how this develops. Right now it's kind of raw and unpolished, but that's to be expected early on.

What's a charter school like? We have ten charter schools in the Oklahoma City district. Tulsa has three, including the Deborah Brown Community School:

Tulsa Public Schools pays Deborah Brown's school about $850,000 a year. All three Tulsa charters outperform the district as a whole, so obviously they've got to go:

What's in that resolution? Michael Bates parses it:

And they're hoping that the law is found unconstitutional on technical grounds, since it covers only thirteen school districts. (Similar arguments were made against the law which permits municipal workers to organize, which applied only to cities 35,000 population and above; the state Supreme Court rejected them.)

As a resident of one of those thirteen districts, I'm firmly in favor of keeping, even expanding, the charters, and it's not hard to see why: if they improve the quality of education available in the district, it will make living here in the central city more appealing. Michael Bates explains:

And the regular schools, contrary to popular belief, benefit also:

The Oklahoma City charter experience has not been so unequivocally positive as Tulsa's — not all OKC charters are outperforming the district — but there's none of Tulsa's disdain, either.

The Tulsa school board will vote on this resolution tonight. Mark Twain is standing by with a remark about idiots, just in case.

Update: Steven Roemerman (the elder) attended the board meeting; the resolution passed 4-3.

Two years ago, I wrote a piece on the points where the life of Martin Luther King, Jr. and the history of Oklahoma City intersected. In case you missed it, I'm reprinting it here.

Nineteen fifty-four. The big story was in Washington, where the Supreme Court, to the surprise of many, had thrown out school segregation:

This was the decision in Brown v. Board of Education, and the Board of Education in question was in Topeka, Kansas.

Farther south, down in Oklahoma City, Martin Luther King, Jr., all of twenty-five years old, was knocking on the door of the Calvary Baptist Church in Deep Deuce, hoping to fill a ministerial vacancy. They turned him down: too young, they said. So King headed east, and wound up the pastor of Dexter Avenue Church in Montgomery, Alabama.

The rest, as they say, is history.

Clara Luper had studied Dr. King's work in Montgomery, where a twelve-month-long boycott of the bus system brought an end to segregation in Alabama public transit. In 1957, her play Brother President, about Dr. King's work, was presented in Oklahoma City with a cast of members of the local NAACP Youth Council, to which Luper was an advisor; the following year, she was able to present the play in New York.

The tour bus had taken a northern route to the Big Apple, where the children experienced for the first time the joys of non-segregated lunch counters. They came back through the south, where Jim Crow still held sway, and they vowed to do something about it. In her book Behold the Walls, Luper remembered it this way:

And so it came to pass that Clara Luper and a dozen children walked into Katz Drug Store in downtown Oklahoma City and ordered thirteen Coca-Colas, and not to go, either. White customers left. A crowd gathered, mostly hostile. Luper and company stood their ground. Epithets were hurled. Finally, still thirsty, they abandoned their quest for the day.

The next day, all the children were back, and a dozen more besides, and they had but a single thought on their minds: "Let's go back downtown." They did. And this time, they got their drinks. Shortly thereafter, Katz headquarters in Kansas City ordered that their soda fountains in all their stores would henceforth serve all customers, period. The walls were coming down.

In 1960, Dr. King returned to Oklahoma City and spoke at Calvary. Fifteen hundred turned out to hear him. There would be no turning back.

Last week in the Oklahoma Gazette, reporter Deborah Benjamin asked former state senator E. Melvin Porter, who was among those 1500, where things stood today. Said Porter:

We're not there yet by any means. But we might not have gotten this far were it not for Dr. King. And that's why this day matters, to all of us, no matter which drinking fountain we got to use back then: today, the waters run more freely than ever.

House Joint Resolution 1007, by Rep. Jason Murphey (R-Guthrie) would lay the groundwork for a State Question which, if approved by voters, would eliminate the Board on Legislative Compensation [link goes to Rich Text Format document] and fix the pay of state legislators, currently $38,400 per year, at:

According to the McCarville Report, this figure currently stands at $29,808.

Text of the proposed State Question:

What you think of this might depend on whether you think state legislators are overpaid. (I'm of two minds here: some of them earn every dime, some of them I'd pay to stay home.) But the idea of indexing their pay to everybody else's has a certain visceral appeal.

That's the title of a radio program developed by Abram Ross in 1948, and it's mentioned in a retrospective of black radio in Oklahoma in this morning's Oklahoman, compiled by Oklahoma Historical Society columnist Max Nichols. One of the more disheartening aspects of it all was the fact that there was this tremendous music scene in Deep Deuce in the 1920s and 1930s that wasn't even slightly reflected by Oklahoma City radio. (Current OKC bands will sigh and go "So what else is new?)

In the late 1940s, things started to change, albeit slowly. Black churches got their services on the air; station KBYE, founded in 1946, began adding programs aimed at the African-American audience. The legendary Ben Tipton, later a fixture at KOCO-TV and eventually an Oklahoma City Councilman — just in case you thought Mick Cornett did it first — was arguably the first black radio star in these parts. (Tipton's last radio gig, if I remember correctly, was at the much-missed KAEZ, a black-owned station that broadcast from on top of a hill at 23rd and Coltrane.) KBYE, which later added an FM service, sustained its audience into the 1970s, the AM side concentrating on gospel, the FM on popular soul music. The go-to guy in "urban" radio these days, of course, is Russell M. Perry, publisher of the Black Chronicle, who started with one AM daytimer and now owns fourteen stations, including KRMP/KVSP in Oklahoma City.

All this is to herald an Historical Society production, scheduled for the 10th of February, titled "History of African Americans in Oklahoma Radio Broadcasting."

We've now gotten to the point where seemingly everyone on earth is Google-able, and we don't think anything of it until we discover someone who isn't — and that goes double if it seems like that someone really ought to be. This past weekend's project was the transfer from LP to CD of an album by Betty Carlton. And who exactly is Betty Carlton? Here's what the liner notes said:

Betty Carlton, Oklahoma's Poet, was born in Ada, Oklahoma and attended East Central University. She is widely known throughout the Southwest for her prize-winning poetry. Her latest award was a national contest in which her entry, "Gramarye," won first place in [a] field of over 5,000 entries.

She has been nominated for the Poet Laureateship of the State of Oklahoma.

She is the first woman ever to teach in an all-male prison in the Oklahoma Correctional System. Her successful creative writing class has opened doors for other women to teach in all-male prisons in the stste.

She is a legal expert on drugs and does extensive rehabilitative work with women alcoholics and drug addicts.

Her poetry ranges from street poetry to mysticism, making it possible for any audience to identify with and enthusiastically welcome her performances.

She is a member of the Oklahoma Poetry Society, the National Federation of State Poetry Societies, and is listed in the International Who's Who in Poetry in London, England.

The album, titled Moxie, was cut in 1976 for the Val-West label in Albuquerque. (The illustration above is the Star of Ishtar by Shirley White, which serves as cover art.) I couldn't tell you how many copies were pressed — a hundred, maybe? — but apparently only two are known to survive, and one of them was brought to me for transfer. "Gramarye," one assumes, is her Greatest Hit — these days, we spell the word "Grimoire" — and it leans hard against the "mysticism" edge of her range; rather than transcribe it here, I'll let you hear it for yourself.

And maybe, just maybe, someone will remember, and will fill in some of the blanks.

One Gersh Kuntzman (like there'd be two Gersh Kuntzmans, or Kuntzmen, or whatever) complains in the Brooklyn Paper that Miss America always seems to come from some place like, well, Oklahoma:

Let the record show that Bethlene Pancoast is indeed hot. (Actually, every woman from Brooklyn I've ever met has been hot, but this is too small a sample to be considered Useful Data.)

And I wouldn't for a moment suggest that there's any connection between the following isolated factoids:

• The Pageant is carried on Country Music Television.

• Ms Pancoast lives in Brooklyn, one of five boroughs of the City of New York, which has no country-music radio station.
  

Nor does she herself suspect a fix:

I admit here that (1) I haven't watched one of these things in thirty years or so, inasmuch as they always seem a tad creepy to me, and (2) Kuntzman may well be right about the notion of American beauty having been "hijacked" — certainly the last time I was in Los Angeles, where beauty is a primary currency, all the Major Babes looked more or less alike.

Still: nyah.

The Metropolitan Library System is now offering downloadable audio books to which you can listen.

Maybe. Dwight is not impressed:

Probably won't work with the Zune, either. And yes, there are workarounds, but:

Careful now. They might start putting DRM on e-books.

Oh, wait ....

Jeff Shaw puts in a good word for something uniquely Tulsa:

That's scary. I live down here at the other end of the turnpike, and I can find the Gilcrease quite easily: I've been there twice in recent years. It's a splendid place, one Tulsa can be proud of. It doesn't get the press of the Philbrook, perhaps because some folks around these parts are still faintly embarrassed by that whole Western and/or Native American business. Fine. If you can't deal with the Old West, perhaps you can handle the gardens, which are lovely in their own right.

Or maybe it's just the Tyranny of the New. Thomas Gilcrease donated his collection of Western art to the city of Tulsa way back in the 1950s, and to some people, it might as well be ancient Sumeria. Distracted by shiny things, I suppose.

The Senate Rules Committee has voted to send SB 16, by Senator Debbe Leftwich (D-OKC), which would eliminate straight-party voting in Oklahoma, to the full Senate.

Jason McCarty over at OK Blue Notes explains the rationale:

This won't affect me: I've never used the straight-party option, and I can think of only one person who might. Is this option actually popular, and will it be missed?

Silly me, I thought life without parole meant, well, life without parole. What was I thinking?

This presents a problem only when you look at the general porosity of state law: says United Victims head Roger Nix, son of Patsy Wells, "According to the loose mental laws in Oklahoma, in 30 days he could be free to walk."

And, well, someone who claims that aliens were controlling his brain is probably not someone who ought to be running around loose, Officer Krupke.

It's not time for Nathan to go yet, and I hope he hangs around for many years more — but when the time comes, this is what he asks of us:

Sanest man alive, if you ask me.

Watch it now before it disappears.

A rumor that's filtered into Consumerist:

Actually, it's against the laws of this state to simplify matters for anyone who's even heard of meth labs. Ask your cousin with the head cold if you don't believe me.

(Besides, whoever came up with the idea that Home Depot might organize its stores by functionality? Not bloodly likely, bucko.)

An idea from Kurt Hochenauer (bottom of item):

I like this idea, with one reservation: if you ask me, there's really no reason to put it in Bricktown, where costs are high and space is more limited every day.

Assuming we're going to do this from the ground up, the most sensible place, I think, would be just south of the "boulevard" that's supposed to replace the Crosstown Expressway. It's still central enough — it wouldn't take much to get COTPA to run a shuttle line in and out — and there's plenty of space down there just screaming for something that vaguely resembles the fabled Groves of Academe.

And the important thing, as Doc Hoc notes, is that it should not duplicate offerings elsewhere. We have rather a lot of four-year institutions already in this state, and there's no point in cloning them.

T Town Tommy follows up on the Lonnie Latham case, which ended this week with the Southern Baptist pastor's acquittal on charges on offering to engage in an act of lewdness.

Earlier, Lachlan had observed:

Which was at the core of Latham's ultimately-successful defense. Tommy notes:

Tommy also links to Latham's Wikipedia page, which is mostly fairly sensible, though this howler got through:

"Rear access"? Real cute. And it's wrong: 39th and Frankford is almost a mile west of the Habana. Besides, December 1998 was seven years before Latham's arrest, and what's more, the Baptist General Convention of Oklahoma headquarters is on May between 37th and 38th; Frankford is the next street east of May. Admittedly, they usually don't stay up until midnight, but this connection is tenuous at best.

Oklahomans Taken for a Ride is a brief (24 minutes) documentary about rail service in Oklahoma, how it could be expanded, and who would prefer that it not be. It's posted at vocallocals.net, a community Web site in Cleveland County (click on the PROJECTS button).

National Public Radio is reporting that China's Nanjing Automotive is abandoning plans to assemble the MG automobile in Ardmore, Oklahoma, even as the first Chinese-built MGs are coming off the line.

Possibly supporting this story is this quote from Nanjing MG general manager Zhang Xin:

No mention of North American sales at all. Then there's this:

There is also a suggestion that tweaking the MG designs to meet US standards might have proven more difficult than anticipated.

Duke Hale had had big plans for MG, but if there's one thing certain in the auto industry, it's that nothing is certain.

Update, 1:45 pm: The Oklahoman reports:

See "Nothing is certain," supra.

Addendum, 7 pm: Statement by Richard Rush of the State Chamber, with audio, denying the NPR story.

The Oklahoma Publishing Company has bought out Griffin Communications' share of NewsOK.com, which eventually will be operated solely by, and as a supplement to, the Oklahoman.

The phrase that pays is here:

No argument from his counterpart:

Certainly NewsOK.com was anomalous: you seldom see media joint ventures of this sort. (More common, but only slightly so, is the case of rival newspapers under a Joint Operating Agreement who have a common Web site, such as NWsource, run by the Seattle Times "representing the Seattle Post-Intelligencer.")

And I have to wonder if maybe KWTV was chafing a bit, given the heavy Web emphasis coming from the competition. At least they've retained the kwtv.com domain, which currently redirects to NewsOK; their new site will be launched next year.

We're not doing such a great job of financing teacher retirement: the state system has never been more than 60-percent funded, and is now running in the vicinity of 49 percent.

Kurt Hochenauer reports on a possible new approach to funding:

Text of the measure (Rich Text format) is here. Says Doc Hoc:

I'm sure I could vote for this measure without affecting my status as a tax-cutting right-wing meanie. And it sailed through the House, 98-3; I'd be very surprised if it died in the Senate, though the wild card here has to be Governor Henry, who's currently in "I have a veto and I'm not afraid to use it" mode.

Well, not anymore: the gas stations along the Turner Turnpike will shut down on the 23rd, leaving the two "service plazas" with a place to eat, but no actual motor fuel.

A spokesman for the turnpike said that the station operator declined to renew the lease on the two stations.

It is possible to exit at Bristow — I've done this — and gas up, then return to the turnpike; presumably it's possible at Wellston. There is no apparent rush to sign up a new operator for the stations.

Former Congressman Ernest Istook now has a blog, and I suppose the only real surprise (if surprise it be) is that it's on Blogspot.

Oh, well. The more, the merrier. And I have to give him some sort of props for this sidebar snark:

I always did appreciate a good non sequitur, but then I never was any good at jai alai.

(Via Mike McCarville.)

The Tailgate Politics take on Denise Bode's replacement on the Corp Comm declares Pete Regan the favorite, and I think he'd fill the slot nicely; he's always struck me as a genuinely positive sort of person, and he does his homework, an essential for a would-be regulator.

There's also a hint that Oklahoma County Commissioner Jim Roth might be under consideration:

I have my doubts. Roth is indeed all of those things, but I can't see him departing county government without some assurance that the place won't be turned over to the likes of Brent Rinehart, and Rinehart isn't about to leave on his own.

As for Ms Bode, I wish her well in the private sector. It will be strange, though, not seeing her name on any more ballots.

Brandon Dutcher of the Oklahoma Council of Public Affairs comes up with a story to explains Brad Henry's suddenly-busy veto pen:

"I'm not sure that it's true," says Dutcher, "but it's certainly plausible." Not to mention consistent with a century of wheeling and dealing.

(Via BatesLine.)

You might be forgiven if you thought that the Oklahoma Legislature was utterly afraid of tattoo artists: while they finally got around to letting the decorators ply their trade, they also stuck them with some locational limitations. The law provides, for instance, that no tattoo parlor can be located within 1000 feet of a school, a church, or a playground, a restriction consistent with — well, nothing, really:

In February, the Association of Body Art, a tattoo trade organization (and who knew there was one of those?), filed suit against the state; yesterday, an Oklahoma County District Judge ruled that the distance regulations, and the requirement for a $100,000 bond, were unconstitutional.

I presume that neither bars nor strip clubs will have to move in the wake of this decision.

Ah, the perils of lead time:

I have to admit, I'd probably be a bit more appreciative if there didn't happen to be "diverse water resources" pooling on my office floor to a depth of 3/8 inch right about now.

(Rainfall for yesterday and today has totaled 4.27 inches; today isn't quite over yet.)

Both high schools in Norman will offer instruction in Chinese this fall, which strikes me as a fairly sensible thing to do (which Chinese? Standard Mandarin?), though I'm not quite sure I buy this rationale:

I am, of course, in favor of being self-serving, but I don't see English being dethroned as the world's lingua franca any time soon, population figures notwithstanding.

Still, Asian influence is growing in Oklahoma. While fumbling around the Web, I turned up this application for the school-lunch program in Oklahoma City schools in Vietnamese. [Link to PDF file.] There being about ten thousand folks in town who trace their ancestry to Vietnam, this seems like a reasonable accommodation. (English Language Learner services are offered by the district in Vietnamese, Lao, and Spanish.) The state school with the widest variety of language instruction might be Booker T. Washington High in Tulsa, which offers eight languages: Chinese, Russian, French, German, Latin, Spanish, Italian and Japanese.

(Norman story via Tailgate Politics.)

Governor Henry has named Oklahoma County Commissioner Jim Roth to the Corporation Commission, to fill the seat being vacated by Denise Bode, and while I have no doubt Roth, a genuine penny-pinching Democrat, will do a bang-up job at the Corp Comm, I worry about what's going to happen to Oklahoma County now that there's one fewer pair of eyeballs keeping watch on Brent "I Will Not Bend" Rinehart, who I have to figure is even now trying to come up with a way to thank the Guv without actually saying anything kindly about him. Mike McCarville is reporting that Forrest Claunch, formerly Representative for House District 101, is hoping to take over District 1 when Roth leaves for the Capitol; good luck with that. (Claunch evidently needs a day job; last year he ran an unsuccessful campaign for state GOP chair.) Governor Henry will have to call a special election sometime between now and November to fill the county vacancy.

Roth will presumably have to run for the Corp Comm in his own right in 2008; it will be almost amusing to see the opposition fall all over itself trying to come up with ways Roth has allegedly been "advancing the homosexual agenda" in the context of regulating utilities and oil producers and such. Because you know they will.

Mike's contemplating getting this vanity tag if it "isn't already taken." He's out of luck; it's not taken, actually, but it's an eight-letter word, and the state limits you to seven characters. [Link to PDF file.] He also quotes a newly-arrived fellow whose plate arrived in two months, which is about two months faster than the state claims it can stamp 'em out. And in point of fact, I don't have a state-issued vanity tag, though since Oklahoma doesn't have a front plate to mess with, I filled up the available space with a bird picture. (Plate graphic courtesy of Acme Labs.)

Actually, it probably wasn't a grizzly, but how often do you get to see this? Four men have pleaded guilty in federal court to a misdemeanor charge of interstate transportation of a bear.

And a dead bear at that: evidently the guys were engaging in some bear-baiting at the Upper Kiamichi Wilderness Area in the Ouachita National Forest, managed to snag one bear, and dragged the carcass into Arkansas.

It should be noted that last year, Governor Henry signed a bill providing for an actual season for hunting of black bear in Oklahoma, pending a study of the bear population; but the bear-baiters in Kiamichi did their kill before the enabling legislation. They were fined, but drew no jail time.

The news that two more ZIP codes will be assigned to the Edmond area got me wondering if we're maxed out yet. The answer is no, but in the entire 730xx range, there remain only nine unused codes: 35, 37, 46, 60, 76, 81, 87, 88 and 91. (This, of course, assumes that the mailing software used at 42nd and Treadmill is actually up to date: if I remember correctly, last time we installed an update was the weekend before the recent rate change, which took place on the 14th.)

And 73060 has been used before: it was originally assigned to Moore, which was subsequently assigned 73160 instead.

Numbers in the 731xx range are served by the Oklahoma City post office; they've got fewer than twenty left. (One of the unused numbers, 73161, was once in use in eastern Oklahoma County; its area was eventually combined with 73141.)

Originally, 732xx and 733xx (and 742xx) were reserved for future expansion, though the Internal Revenue Service has commandeered 73301 for itself. The others remain in the pool, though I wouldn't