BatesLine

In my latest column for Urban Tulsa Weekly, I make reference to a James Thurber short story which defines the phrase you see above, an apt description for the situation the Tulsa Drillers find themselves in.

You can read Thurber's "The Catbird Seat" by following this link. It has little to do with baseball, but it is a clever turning-the-tables story with a surprise ending that will make you smile. Here's how it starts:

Mr. Martin bought the pack of Camels on Monday night in the most crowded cigar store on Broadway. It was theatre time and seven or eight men were buying cigarettes. The clerk didn’t even glance at Mr. Martin, who put the pack in his overcoat pocket and went out. If any of the staff at F & S had seen him buy the cigarettes, they would have been astonished, for it was generally known that Mr. Martin did not smoke, and never had. No one saw him.

It was just a week to the day since Mr. Martin had decided to rub out Mrs. Ulgine Barrows. The term “rub out” pleased him because it suggested nothing more than the correction of an error – in this case an error of Mr. Fitweiler. Mr. Martin had spent each night of the past week working out his plan and examining it. As he walked home now he went over it again....

Dear Lowe's Customer Service:

The submersible pump for our goldfish pond broke late yesterday, too late to make it to Cornerstone Waterscapes or Hardscape to buy a replacement.

Both of those specialty stores are closed Sunday, and our goldfish seemed to be gasping for air this morning. My wife declared an emergency, previous after-church plans were canceled, and I came to your store at 15th and Yale to buy something with which to aerate the pond.

I purchased your 1300 gallon/hour pump and your pressurized filter with UV light, along with 20 feet of corrugated 3/4" PVC tubing, as was recommended on the box.

When I got it home, it was clear that the outlet for the pump wouldn't fit inside the tubing. So back to the store I went, traipsing back and forth between the plumbing aisle and the pond aisle, trying to find an adapter that would allow me to connect the two.

When I got back home, I discovered that the filter kit contained three nozzles, one of which was for the pump.

When I finally got it all put together and switched it on, I was underwhelmed. The flow was a mere trickle, even though this pump had a higher rating (1300 gph) then my previous pump (1200 gph), an American-made Little Giant submersible pump (5-MSPR-WG). It is not a strong enough stream to aerate the pond. I tried it with the pump only and without the "pressurized" filter, and there was only a slight improvement.

Here's the best way to describe it: The old Little Giant pump was like a 21-year-old after a 6-pack of beer. The new Lowe's pump is like an 80-year-old with prostate problems.

I hope in the future Lowe's will stock high-quality American made pumps instead of shoddy but expensive Chinese products. But I won't hold my breath.

Unfortunately, my fish may have to.

Yours in algae,

Michael Bates

Is it wrong that when I see a picture of a certain stubble-headed celebrity on the supermarket tabloids, I hear "bwoop-woop-woop-woop," "nyuck, nyuck, nyuck," and "soitanly!"

Click the banner for details.

I've suspected this for a long time:

(Received via e-mail from Kirk Jordan's Mighty Works Project. Kirk was staff photographer in Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee's administration. You can see a few of his more artistic work here.)

Feel free to submit your own unintentionally funny cancellation notices, real or imaginary, in the comments.

Another blog meme.

My Peculiar Aristocratic Title is: His Grace Lord Michael the Wholesome of Withering Glance Get your Peculiar Aristocratic Title

(Via His Most Noble Lord Shane the Sonorous of Leper St George. Leper St. George must be a chapel-of-ease somewhere in the Oklahoma panhandle.)

How I scored on the Nerd, Geek, or Dork test:

(Via Charles' MySpace blog.)

As a fan of the comic strip Pogo, I've read many biographical sketches of cartoonist Walt Kelly, but I never remember having read that he wrote and illustrated a comic book series based on the Our Gang shorts. (You might know them better as "The Little Rascals" -- Spanky, Buckwheat, Alfalfa, etc.)

Earlier this year, Fantagraphics published a reissue of Walt Kelly's Our Gang comic books from 1942 and 1943, volume 1 of a planned series. The ALA Booklist blurb has this to say:

Although the Our Gang film series was on its last legs in 1942, Dell Comics launched a comic-book version of it that is more than a footnote to the films because it was written and drawn by Walt Kelly, seven years before he brought Pogo to the newspapers. Ironically, while the films were by then slick and mannered, having lost their low-budget modesty after MGM took over producing them, in Kelly's comics they regained much of their earlier, unaffected charm, thanks to his winsome story lines, homey characterizations, and engaging cartooning.

(*After Disney, Before Pogo. Kelly was one of the animators on Fantasia (1940); the Beethoven's Pastoral Symphony segment, featuring centaurs, putti, Zeus, Bacchus, and other characters from Greek mythology, bears his unmistakable touch. As a two- and three-year-old, my now-10-year-old son watched this segment over and over again, and Iris, who brought forth the rainbow after the storm, was his first imaginary friend. He called her "the rainbow princess.")

The 365 Days Project was offline for a time, but it's back, for good, evidently. For every day of 2003, a new piece of rare and usually strange audio was posted, in MP3 format -- covers of famous songs by unknown singers, promotional discs, kiddie records. Some music, some spoken word.

The June 27 entry is from a three-disc set of speeches from the 1968 Amway convention. It's Paul Harvey in his prime. Here's the link with all the entries for the last half of June; you'll have to scroll down to find it. (If you keep going, you'll find some early Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker and a song by Thurl Ravenscroft.)

As an aside: Many thanks to MeeCiteeWurkor! Not only did he tip me to problems with the way the main BatesLine page was displaying on certain browsers, he came up with a fix for the problems. If this page is displaying strangely or you have a suggestion for improvement, don't hesitate to e-mail me at blog at batesline dot com.

Here's a funny little film by Matt Leach and Earnest Pettie, filmed right here in Tulsa, about the prejudice suffered by "A Man with a Moustache". (Note: This would probably be rated PG for a couple of mild vulgarities.)

(UPDATE: I moved the video after the jump. That close-up of the mustache was CREEPING ME OUT.)

I think the result would have been different if they'd asked how to pronounce Hahvahd, Cuber, Dwochestah, Wistah, and Cahtawk.

Via Don (or is that Dawn?) Danz.

My intro to Bostonian speech was this little article in HoToGAMIT (How to Get Around MIT) -- there have been a few additions in the succeeding quarter-century since I matriculated.

Lark News, a satirical evangelical news website, has posted its December issue. A couple of the articles awaiting you:

• "Pastor tries inauthenticity": "'I don't see much benefit in everybody knowing everything about me,' says Bradley. 'Jesus' example is to be guarded and realistic about human nature. I feel good about reserving some of myself for me.'"
• "C&E Christians gear up for holiday season": "But many C&E families who attend church on special days dread the inevitable wooing that follows. Last year Glen and Belinda McMurty of Bakersfield, Calif., 'did everything wrong' during an Easter visit to church. 'Normally we prepare, but this time we got lazy,' Glen says. 'We asked for directions to the nursery, borrowed a Bible and stood around looking confused. We should have just hung a sign around our necks that said "fresh meat."'"

You've heard of a Proverbs 31 woman? Last month Lark News introduced us to the Proverbs 31 man:

MINOT, N.D. — Jack Crocker, a beer-loving machinist and "part-time Christian," finally agreed to read Proverbs with wife Reanna. He's glad he did.

"I'm a Proverbs 31 husband all right," says Jack, then quotes Proverbs 31:6-7: "Give beer to those who are perishing, wine to those who are in anguish; let them drink and forget their poverty and remember their misery no more."

"That's my permission to crack open a cold one," Jack says, having a Coors after dinner.

[Read the rest.]

MEANWHILE across the pond, there's a new movement in the Anglican church: Affirming Laudianism. Named in honor of the 17th century Archbishop of Canterbury who attempted to impose a high-church uniformity on both England and Scotland, the movement is not focused on doctrine "but is solely concerned with the externals of religion and including the ambitious." It is affiliated with the "Old Wine Skins" initiative, which believes "that vitality in Church life can co-exist with decadence and hypocrisy." (Found via Tom Gray, who must have been struck by parallels with the old wine skin from which Kirk of the Hills recently burst forth.)

Since Charles Schulz's death, United Feature Syndicate has been running Peanuts strips from many years ago. If I recall correctly, some of the first reruns were from the '70s.

Right now, they're running strips from 1959, and if you hurry, you'll find, in the 30-day online archive:

• The last few strips of Linus' first "Great Pumpkin" disappointment: "I was a victim of false doctrine."
• Linus' ambition to be a "world-famous humble little country doctor": "I love mankind... it's people I can't stand!"
• The introduction of Pig-Pen: "He may be carrying soil that was trod upon by Solomon or Nebuchadnezzar or Genghis Khan."

I first encountered these strips in the Peanuts paperbacks my grandmother gave me. (She also infected me with a love of Pogo.) These strips are from the golden era of Peanuts, and it's nice to know that a new generation of comics-readers are seeing them for the first time.

Sometime last year, Sacha Baron Cohen, as Borat Sagdiyev, his Kazakh news reporter persona, visited the offices of the Oklahoma Republican Party and spoke to then Oklahoma Republican Party chairman Gary Jones about the art of speechmaking:

I think Gary handled himself with a lot of grace, particularly with the awkward situation that Borat put him in at the end of the clip.

Funny, but the music is all wrong. It should start with ominous minor-key strings and change to something bouncy and upbeat when the good guy comes on screen.

A little breather while we wait for the results to come in. Ladies and gentlemen, it's Gene, Gene, the Dancing Machine:

TV veteran Mark Evanier writes of the effect of a Gene, Gene appearance at another Gong Show taping:

The minute they started playing his music — "Jumpin' at the Woodside," I think the tune's called — the studio positively erupted. Barris started dancing and the panelists jumped up and started dancing...and you could feel how much Gene Gene enjoyed what he was doing. Okay, fine, they're performers. It's part of the act. But the crew also started dancing — people not on screen. The guy operating Camera 1 was operating Camera 1 and dancing at the same time. Grips were dancing, lighting guys were dancing, the members of the band were dancing as much as they could and still play their instruments. And of course, the audience — an odd mix of younger Gong Show fans intermingled with old ladies who couldn't get in to the Hollywood Squares taping down the hall — simply had to leap up and boogie. Some of the show's performers and staffers were a little (shall we say) under the influence of something...but the crew wasn't and the audience wasn't. It was just an honest "high" of excitement.

I've been on many TV stages in my life. I've seen big stars, huge stars — Johnny, Frank, Sammy, Dino, Bob, you name 'em. I've seen great acts and great joy, and if you asked me to name the most thrilling moment I've witnessed in person, I might just opt for the Gong Show electrifying Stage 3 for all of 120 seconds. Maybe it was because it came so totally out of nowhere that it stunned me but everyone, including the stone-cold sober people, was suddenly just so...happy. There was something very, very invigorating and enjoyable about being in the midst of all that sudden happiness, however frivolous it may have been.

C'mon, dance! You know you want to.

Tiny Tim sings his signature tune on Rowan and Martin's Laugh-In in 1968, as Dick Martin looks on in awe, or something like it:

By the way, that was Judy Carnes taking away Tiny Tim's cape at the beginning of the clip, and Goldie Hawn walking off with him at the end.

Laugh-In was my favorite prime-time show back then. Although much of the humor sailed over my five-year-old head, it was my introduction to both topical satire and zany madcap humor, which developed into an appreciation for Mad magazine, Monty Python's Flying Circus, Saturday Night Live, and the comic strip Pogo.

(Via Dawn Eden, who says she is "determined to make the most of YouTube's vintage treasures before the inevitable copyright crackdown." If you ever want to save a video from YouTube or another video-sharing service for posterity, KeepVid takes the video's URL and turns it into a link for downloading the Flash video (.flv). [There are ways to do this manually if you have the patience to wade through HTML source code.] The very versatile open-source viewer VideoLAN has built-in Flash video playback capability and is available for Windows, Mac OS X, and various flavors of Linux.)

RELATED: tvhistory.tv has scans of the prime-time schedule grids for the 1960s (back when all the networks premiered shows in the fall and mid-season changes were unusual).

Tonight and Saturday night at 10 p.m., the Circle Cinema in Whittier Square, Admiral & Lewis, will show the classic zombie thriller, "Night of the Living Dead," followed by a mystery zombie film. Zombie Tom would be pleased, I'm sure.

Also coming up on the Circle Cinema calendar, they'll be showing what may be the worst movie of all time, Ed Wood's "Plan 9 from Outer Space" as the midnight movie on Friday, November 17th and Saturday, November 18th. It truly is so bad that it's good.

Meanwhile, if you'd like to see films that are more uplifting and positive (but more spooky than usual this month) and which feature little to no brain-eating, check out this Saturday night's monthly screening of the Altarnet Film Society at Agora Coffeehouse, 7:30 p.m. in the Fontana Shopping Center, 51st & Memorial.

This is the toughest Sudoku puzzle I've come across yet. It was generated at random by the excellent Sudoku program I have on my PDA. Solving it -- as opposed to making guesses and backtracking when the guess turns out wrong -- required some advanced techniques I had yet to learn. See how you do with it.

UPDATE: Here's a link to the Sudoku Solver, with the puzzle above already loaded, so you can not only see the solution, but how the puzzle can be solved.

This link will show the puzzle completely solved.

One of the "top sellers" at t-shirthumor.com. Found at White Knuckled Wanderer.

(That same blogger, Bill McNeal has an interesting item about how Fairfax County, Virginia, back in the '60s, screwed up their chance to benefit by the extension of the Washington Metro, and they're screwing it up again. By putting an elevated transit line down the middle of the freeway, they made it impossible to create dense development around the transit stops, which means the Metro line does less than it could to alleviate traffic problems.)

There are all sorts of websites devoted to humor, and all sorts devoted to Evangelical Christianity, but there are a number that combine the two, poking gentle fun, from an inside perspective, at the unintentionally funny things about Evangelical subculture.

One of my favorite such sites is Lark News, a fake-news website in the mold of The Onion (but without any of the filthy stuff The Onion sometimes runs). To give you a flavor, here are a few headlines:

• 40 Days of Purpose draws Deadhead-style following
• Jack Chick buys popular comic strips
• Missionaries maintain obesity against long odds
• Rapture takes two
• Christian couple maintains abstinence through first two years of marriage
• Mega-church downsizes, cuts non-essential members
• New Guinea tribe sees savior in Ark. pastor
• Man in market for Single, Lonely and Depressed Study Bible
• Presb. Church USA launches ambitious plan to lose only 5% of members
• Small Group 'Survivor' experiment fizzles
• Outsourced prayer lines confuse callers

Other Evangelical humor sites find that truth is stranger than fiction:

• Purgatorio: "a panoply of evangelical eccentricities, un-orthodox oddities & christian cultural curiosities." My favorite feature is Divine Vinyl -- odd album covers for Christian albums. There's a lot more polyester on display than actual vinyl.
• Crummy Church Signs: Documenting the weird and the trite.
• Kinda Kitschy: Does anyone really need a Thomas Kinkade angel figurine?

The British website Ship of Fools is broadly Christian, not specifically Evangelical. It's also not solely a humor site. (It reminds me of the way the British satirical mag Private Eye mixes satire and serious investigative articles.) Favorite features include Signs and Blunders and The Mystery Worshipper -- reviews of church services of all denominations from all over the world. The latest "blunder" is a phone message left by a vistor to a church on the pastor's answering machine, gently letting the pastor know that one of the female worship leaders was getting into the music a little more than she should. (After listening to the phone message, you can hear it remixed and set to music!)

In honor of my six year old, who lost one front tooth on Sunday and the other today, the Spike Jones classic:

What Veggie Tales character are you?

Bob
Take this quiz!

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(Hat tip to Eric at the Fire Ant Gazette.)

Looking for trenchant political analysis or deep thoughts? Then scroll past this entry.

My favorite band in high school and college was Devo -- nerd music par excellence. I was thinking about Devo tonight and went looking for Devo videos on YouTube. I wasn't disappointed.

Weird Al Yankovic's song "Dare to Be Stupid" is the ultimate parody of Devo's music. It isn't a parody of a specific song, but it captures the Devo sound and amps up the trademark weirdness of their lyrics by stringing together in random order twisted versions of proverbs and slogans. The video "Dare to Be Stupid" borrows from a dozen or so Devo music videos from their heyday. If you're a Devo fan, you'll laugh with recognition.

OK, one more favorite Weird Al video -- "I Lost on Jeopardy" -- complete with Art Fleming, Don Pardo, the original Jeopardy set, and a cameo by Dr. Demento.

Evidently, Richard Hedgecock doesn't want me to get anything productive done, because he sent me a link to a page of classic TV food ads on RoadOde.com: Franco-American, LaChoy ("Swing American!"), Alka-Seltzer ("Whatever shape your stomach's in"), and more. The home page of RoadOde.com has clips from Carpenters TV specials (Karen Carpenter and Ella Fitzgerald sing "This Masquerade" -- what voices!), soda commercials, movie theater concession ads ("Let's all go to the lobby"), outtakes from '60s and '70s TV shows, theme openers from the Patty Duke Show, My Three Sons, and the Pruitts of Southampton (you remember, Phyllis Diller's show).

Maybe the most poignant clip on the whole site is the feed from the Oval Office just before President Nixon's resignation speech on August 8, 1974. There's not an easy way to link to this -- go to the home page, click the "Outtakes" tab, and it's the first item. The description says, "Surprisingly, he was in a good mood."

Wow! They've got a commercial for Chef Boyardee pizza mix. Other than baking cookies with Mom, this was one of the first things I cooked as a kid. I remember the challenge of getting just amount of water into the dough mix -- it never seemed like enough, but it always was. We always made the pepperoni variety, and my little sister always had macaroni and cheese instead, because she didn't like pizza.

Long before the MasterSingers chanted the Highway Code and the Weather Forecast....

Long before the King's Singers chanted BBC radio frequency changes....

In 1939, Cary Grant chanted the FCC's station identification regulations on the star-studded NBC program The Circle. Cary sings with a kind of psalm tone -- all on one note, with an inflection on the final syllables of each line -- but each line is in a higher key.

(Via WFMU's Beware of the Blog.)

...playing Sudoku on my new Treo, that is. Andrew Gregory has created a very nice, very easy-to-use Sudoku game that runs on Palm OS PDAs. You can play this version without using the stylus -- with just the five-way cursor and the numeric keypad. It's addictive.

So is TROGDOR!, one of the Shockwave Flash games on HomestarRunner.com. The Homestar Runner Wiki has TROGDOR! tips, including a way to get 27 extra lives. But it doesn't matter how many lives I start with, I can't make it past level 26. Anyone know what the trick is?

Michael Cook has discovered the joys of a certain variety of unsolicited commercial e-mail (aka spam):

One feature of the genius of Dickens was the names with which he christened his characters -- Wackford Squeers, Ebenezer Scrooge, Wilkins Micawber and the like. But spammers have out-Dickensed Dickens. In the past week, I have received spam advertising mortgage schemes, drugs and Rolexes from:

Sport P. Fundamentalism
Interrogation C. Samoset
Magnus Tobechi
Besieger O. Permafrost
Snowflake E. Catalpas
Typewriter U. Furze
Elmo Pendleton
Malachi Patterson
Ducat T. Diphtheria
Discountenanced S. Terminable

There�s a sort of lunatic vitality in these names. Only someone with an iron will could avoid opening an email from Mummification K. Sitar.

(Found via the Curt Jester.)

I've written twice before about this type of spam. Back in March 2004, most of the mail I received with such interesting sender names seemed to be promoting Russian businesses.

The names in the From line are wonderful -- Stying K. Purgative, Mustered O. Behemoths, Headwaters I. Evidence, Circularizing T. Integers, Disassemble H. Imps, Rallies Q. Stratification, Accretions G. Recital -- they are obviously not names, but they have the rhythm of names, reminiscent of the sort that Barry Took and Marty Feldman cooked up for sketches on "Round the Horne", like Isambard Mousehabit and J. Peasemould Gruntfuttock. (Or the Li'l' Abner character, Jubilation T. Cornpone.) So we know the spambot writer is evil, but has a sense of humor.

In that same article, I described the technical rationale behind the use of such strange names, and the means by which spammers were hijacking computers around the world to send their messages.

Then again in March 2005, I blogged about the latest batch of funny-name spam, having a bit of fun with some of the stranger combinations.

I've had trouble finding out more about this particular variety of spam, and I think it's because no one has given it a name. Henceforth, I dub this phenomenon "Jubilation T. Cornpone spam," in honor of the military hero of the town of Dogpatch, the comic-strip character whose name resembles the names found in these unsolicited commercial e-mail messages.

Maybe if we all call it by the same name, we can track down the person or persons responsible for all this spam and bring them to account. At the very least, I'd love to have their name-generation algorithm.

Jan, the Happy Homemaker, has been posting more vintage Valentines from a scrapbook she acquired a while back. You can find them in her February and January archives. (You'll find more Valentines and other ephemera from the scrapbook in her January 2005 and February 2005 archives.)

Meanwhile, it appears that our beloved Mayor, Bill LaFortune, has adapted one of those vintage Valentines to send his own heartfelt message.

I was thinking of all that we need to get done in the next week or so, and the phrase "miles to go before I sleep," from Robert Frost's poem, Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening. That took me down some mental pathways I haven't traveled in a while.

That phrase reminded me of a comic strip that ran in the early 1980s called Miles to Go, about a dog named Miles who worked in a used pet store. I remember clipping a Christmastime strip where Miles reviews the gifts he received from the other pets -- the payoff panel has him making a face over Mrs. Rabbit's raisin bread.

A Google search turns up the artist's name -- Phil Frank. Frank has another strip called Farley which has been running for 30 years; for the last 20 years exclusively in the San Francisco Chronicle. Somewhere in my Googling I read that Miles has made some appearances in Farley since the end of his own strip.

The Tulsa Tribune carried Miles to Go, and they also carried a strip called Wright Angles, which wasn't an animal strip, but the breakout character was a cat named Motley. Motley really captured the essence of finicky, self-centered cat-ness, and his attitude and appearance reminded me of our family's beloved cat, Flakey. The artist, Larry Wright, retired the strip sometime around 1990, but it's being serialized on United Media's website, retitled in honor of the cat.

Both strips ended before the advent of the World Wide Web, which would explain why neither has much of a presence on the 'net. (Yes, the old Wright Angles strips are on United Media's site under the name Motley, you won't find many references beyond that. And I haven't found anything that says that Motley is a repeat of Wright Angles, as obvious as that is.)

I am pleased to see classic comic strips running alongside new strips -- online at least. There are networks dedicated to classic TV shows, radio stations that play classic rock and classic country, so why not rerun the best cartoons?

My friend Daaaaaave Russ wrote from Florida to tip me off about a nifty electronics project that was done right here in Tulsa by one Josh McCormick -- modifying a $50 singing/dancing Wal-Mart Santa to produce different sounds and movements:

I've had a Parallax BASIC Stamp for some time. The nice BS2P40 model. For those not familiar with the BASIC Stamp, it is a computer chip that you can program in a simple language that can monitor and control things. It is nowhere near as complex as a full-blown computer, but it requires just a minimum of wiring and electronics to run. It just takes some good programming and some very basic electronics....

The problem is that I hadn't been able to find many interesting things to do with it. I created a little display toy (persistence of vision) with some full color (RGB) LEDs. That was about it. But last month, an interesting announcement hit my mailbox. It was a call for entries [Word Document] for a local non-conformist art show in Tulsa!

I've got to do something. But what can I do? LEDs? No, too boring. So I went browsing the isles of Wal*Mart and see if there were any good hackable items to be had there. Sure enough, there were a few candidates. But one item out of the entire store screamed "hack me" more than anything else. The $49.84 animatronic Santa Claus.

Sadly, the non-conformist art show folks didn't appreciate his efforts:

Two days later, the judging came, and I got a phone call from the art gallery. They said they had a lot of entries this year, and they apologize that the judging was "rather ruthless". My entry did not qualify for the exhibit. I was slightly disappointed, but I was a little confused. From what I was told, the judges leaned more towards mainsteam art. You know... sculpture, painting, etc. No big deal, I really didn't put my self worth on the line with this one. But they wanted it out of their gallery by the end of the day.

I arrive at the art gallery and checked out the remaing artworks. Most of them seem sexual in nature. You know. George Bush with an erection, that sort of thing. Were these the winners, or other losers like myself?

Click through for videos of Hacked Santa in action, plus all the gory technical details. If you can handle dark humor, don't miss the list of candidate phrases for Hacked Santa to say: "I can give you free stuff because I skimp on Elf health care! HO HO HO!!"

Fellow Okie blogger Sean Gleeson has developed an online Texas Hold 'Em game for cable superstation TBS. It's called Very Funny Texas Hold 'Em. If you've flipped through the cable channels at 3 a.m. and found nothing on but Celebrity Poker Death Match, or if you've been perplexed by a Dawn Summers blog entry full of terms like flop, check, and river, and wondered what all that is about, click that link. There's a section of the game that explains the rules very clearly. (Sean's game cannot help you if you are perplexed by any other Dawn Summers blog entry.)

The game is For Entertainment Only -- no actual money changes hands, so there's no risk except your time and attention. Check it out.

I'd like to see Sean merge this with his Autorantic Virtual Moonbat.

(UPDATED to remove the parenthetical remark at the beginning of the entry, which was written before I had heard about the tornado in southern Indiana Sunday night.)

Sobics School, a Korean educational company (as nearly as I can tell), offers a couple of very addictive Flash games which are similar in some respects to Super Collapse -- clicking on groups of blocks to make them disappear. Both feature very cute 3D characters that make baby noises. I spent more time than I care to admit playing Game 02, which is a bit more fun than Game 01. You'll find links to the two games here, and the menu for the "Fun" section of the website here.

Via Mister Snitch, who says Game 02 "may be the most addictive game ever."

If you prefer your Flash games in English, try Big Idea's collection.

Here's a trailer for a recut, warm, family-friendly version of "The Shining".

Here's the blog of the creators of that one, plus two more. The new "West Side Story" didn't turn out so happy. Unison rhythmic movement: Choreography, or the tragic effect of widely-dispersed neurotoxins?

Via Mr. Snitch!

I don't do these too often, much less pass them along, but the approach this test takes seems to work:

the Wit (61% dark, 30% spontaneous, 15% vulgar)

your humor style: CLEAN | COMPLEX | DARK You like things edgy, subtle, and smart. I guess that means you're probably an intellectual, but don't take that to mean pretentious. You realize 'dumb' can be witty--after all isn't that the Simpsons' philosophy?--but rudeness for its own sake, 'gross-out' humor and most other things found in a fraternity leave you totally flat. I guess you just have a more cerebral approach than most. You have the perfect mindset for a joke writer or staff writer. Your sense of humor takes the most thought to appreciate, but it's also the best, in my opinion. You probably loved the Office. If you don't know what I'm talking about, check it out here: http://www.bbc.co.uk/comedy/theoffice/. PEOPLE LIKE YOU: Jon Stewart - Woody Allen - Ricky Gervais The 3-Variable Funny Test! - it rules - If you're interested, try my latest: The Terrorism Test

As a matter of fact, I love "The Office." (Via Miss GOP.)

In a case somewhat reminiscent of the Tulsa Whirled's threats against this blog,
attorneys representing humorist Garrison Keillor have sent a cease-and-desist letter to MNspeak.com over the sale of T-shirts bearing the phrase "A Prairie Ho Companion". MNspeak.com says the T-shirts are parody and therefore covered under fair use. Keillor's attorneys are claiming a "likelihood of confusion." (Link via Mister Snitch!)

(What is the difference between a humorist and a comedian, you ask? A comedian makes you laugh out loud. A humorist evokes a wry, knowing chuckle.)

I used to be a fan of Mr. Keillor's. No, Garrison Keillor was my idol. When he announced his retirement in 1987, I spent the rest of the spring arranging my schedule around taping each week's episode of "A Prairie Home Companion." When I went to Duluth, Minnesota that summer for a wedding, I drove through Anoka, his hometown, and Milaca, a town that that was one of the inspirations for Lake Wobegon. I loved the weekly radio serial -- Buster, the Show Dog -- the parody commercials, and the news from Lake Wobegon. I have most of his books and several tape collections of Lake Wobegon stories. Just as Keillor was inspired to create PHC by a visit to the Grand Ole Opry, I fantasized about hosting my own PHC-like radio show, live every week from Cain's Ballroom, opening with an appropriate bit of Western Swing. (Note to self: Enough already. You're cringing with embarrasment.)

During the original run of PHC, Keillor's tone reflected an affection for small-town life and simple faith. Politics was far in the background, except for a brief lament following Walter Mondale's 1984 landslide defeat. Back in the day, there were articles written about Keillor as a kind of proto-evangelist -- not directly sharing the gospel, but laying the groundwork.

Keillor deserves credit for bringing some great musicians to a wider audience: Johnny Gimble, Chet Atkins, Butch Thompson, and Riders in the Sky, to name a few. Bob and Ray were guests on the show, and Bob Elliott was a regular on the New York-based follow-on series, "American Radio Company". His CD collection of Pretty Good Jokes is responsible for my son, at age 4, telling complete strangers the joke about how many insurance salesmen it takes to screw in a light bulb.

At some point, Keillor stopped gently tweaking the insufferably pompous and became insufferably pompous himself. Where he had once injected politics into his stories in only the most subtle ways, he now delivered ham-handed harangues. I can't tell you how long it's been since I tuned in to PHC -- ten years?

The mention of ham-handedness brings us back to the topic at hand. The proprietor of MNspeak.com politely pointed out to Keillor's attorneys that pursuing this lawsuit would make Keillor the object of riducule throughout the blogosphere. Nevertheless, Keillor persisted. So far the story has shown up on InstaPundit and plenty of other places. Prof. Reynolds' quick putdown: "I never thought Keillor had much of a sense of humor."

I've recommended that MNspeak.com get in touch with the Media Bloggers Association for advice. Ron Coleman, the MBA's counsel, wrote a letter on my behalf that persuaded the Tulsa Whirled to back off. (Alas, Coleman's blog on intellectual property matters, Likelihood of Confusion, is offline. Looks like he may be in the midst of a conversion from Movable Type to Word Press.) (UPDATE: Ron's back up.)

The writers of history concentrate on Great Events, Great Movements, and Great Men. Even in recounting our individual stories, we focus on the milestones -- graduated from high school, graduated from college, got married, had kids. The ordinary stuff of everyday life is taken for granted as we live through it and usually forgotten, although it seems to linger in the back of our brains.

One of the wonderful things about the World Wide Web is that it provides a home for commemorating things that would never be enough to warrant an encyclopedia entry, a monument, or even a brief mention in a book.

One such site is called Tick Tock Toys. It is devoted to child-targeted consumer culture from the Baby Boom era -- the late '40s into the early '70s. Powdered drink mixes, fast food, candy, comic books, theme parks, breakfast cereals (and the promotional items placed in the boxes) -- they all find a home here.

Remember Funny Face powdered drink mix? Remember Choo-Choo Cherry, Jolly Olly Orange, Goofy Grape, Loud Mouth Lime? Here's a list of all the flavors, linked to pictures of the packages.

Remember Burger Chef? There was one in Tulsa on 41st Street just west of I-44, where the Whataburger is now. There used to be an old Burger Chef long closed, but still standing along North Peoria. We used to stop at the one in Springdale, Arkansas, about halfway to Grandma's house in Mountain Home. Before they repainted the IPE Building (sorry, Expo Building), it looked like a great big Burger Chef, with its orange and turquoise colors. Tick Tock Toys has a collection of ephemera from Burger Chef and other fast-food restaurants -- pictures of burger boxes and wrappers, employee manuals, cups, and kids meal toys. (Here's another site with great photos of Burger Chef stores.)

Browsing through Tick Tock Toys will inspire exclamations of, "I had one of those!" If I'm ever up for Senate confirmation, this may come up, so I'll just 'fess up now: I was a member of the Banana Splits Fan Club, had the Banana Splits Fan Club kit, including secret decoder, and actually organized a neighborhood chapter.

Hat tip for the Tick Tock Toys link to Mister Snitch!, a blog mainly about Hoboken, New Jersey. The blog's name is a tip of the hat to Hoboken history -- the name of a gossip column that ran in the Hoboken Pictorial once upon a time. It's thanks to this entry by Mister Snitch! back in May that this BatesLine entry is the number one Google result for the phrase "local-blog Instapundit". Mister Snitch! encourages other Hoboken and New Jersey bloggers by posting regular round-ups, much like our own Okiedoke does for Okie bloggers. That's not all he writes about -- here's an interesting recent entry called, "What is the proper role of government in the economy?"

Caren Lissner has several chuckle-worthy items. (In the last one, the chuckle's at the end, but the rest of the entry is pretty interesting, too.)

Mena Trott, of Six Apart, the company responsible for the software that runs this and many, many other blogs, has a clever slideshow: "If Bloggers Had Been Around through History". (Via Vidiot.)

Remember the screen captures from a Chinese edition of "Star Wars III: Revenge of the Sith," in which the subtitles were translations back into English of a translation into Chinese? More screen caps have been added -- a total of 62 by my count, and there's a mirror copy of half of the screencaps available here. (Hat tip, again, to Vidiot. My comments linking the original entry, here. Jeremy, the blogger who started this, has an interesting entry about a visit to a seafood market and restaurant in Ningbo.)

Somewhat related: I just came across a quote of my daughter's, dated 12/29/2003, which I jotted down at the time. At age three, she picked up on her older brother's enthusiasm for all things Star Wars. For a while she refused to wear anything described as cute, because Jedis didn't wear cute things. She was also in the midst of being potty-trained (not training the potty, Caren), and said, after being told to try to use the potty, "Jedis do NOT go to the bathroom."

Michael Moore. Fat farm. "Camp Granada" parody. Huffington's Toast. You know you want to read it.

Is there no end to the helpful information on the Internet?

If your enjoyment of Mystery Science Theater 3000 (MST3K) is hindered by a failure to understand the cultural references in the wisecracks hurled at the screen, take heart! Visit The Annotated MST, which to date has annotations for 32 episodes.

And if you've never seen MST3K, you might want to check out this site.

What do you do when you see your kids cackling over a Strongbad email episode featuring Homestar Runner spitting Teddy Grahams at the ceiling for fun, and you want to see it for yourself, but you can't remember the name of the episode?

Visit the Homestar Runner wiki, where you'll find a searchable database of scripts of all the H*R animations.

The web is too cool.

P.S. The episode in question is "Couch Patch" -- wiki entry is here.

Remembered this today, for no particular reason, and got a laugh out of it. It's from "The Testing of Eric Olthwaite," an episode of Ripping Yarns, a mid-70s British series written by Michael Palin and Terry Jones of Monty Python's Flying Circus. When Eric's family runs away from home, his neighbor, Mr. Bag, must tell Eric the awful truth:

Well... look, Eric, it's like this... there are some people in life who are... you know -- interesting people -- good company, fun to be with... the kind of people who, when you meet them on the street, your heart lifts and you say to yourself: "Ah! There's old So and So! Isn't it grand to see him!" People who make you glad... people who make you fell that life's worth living... Well, you're not one of them, Eric.

We saw the IMAX version of "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory" with our two kids (9 and 4) and some friends -- a couple and their daughters, aged 7 and 4. Worth seeing in the theater, worth seeing in IMAX -- I wouldn't say that about too many films. Way better than the '70s version with Gene Wilder.

Favorite kid reaction: When Willie Wonka orders the Oompa-Loompas to roll Violet Beauregard to the juicing room after she has turned into a giant blueberry, my four-year-old called out, "Oh, man! I do not want to see this part!"

If Roger Ebert's column is like a bakery, BatesLine is the day-old bread store. You can count on BatesLine to give you the straight scoop on movies you've already seen, maybe several times, in the theater, on DVD, and on the late Friday slot of OETA's Movie Club.

We had a date night tonight and went to see "Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" at Movies 8, which is Cinemark's local dollar theater. Mikki and I were impressed by the inch-thick accumulation of dust on the neon sign above the concession stand.

While the place may not be maintained to the standard of the chain's local flagship (the Tulsa, around the corner on 71st Street), there was a good crowd to see the film, and they were well-mannered. It was even quiet during the previews.

And during the previews there was an ad for Coca-Cola featuring their new blog site -- mycoke.com. I won't bother hot-linking that -- you've got to register (for free), and bugmenot.com doesn't have a login yet. Presumably you can start your own blog and read those of others who are blogging for Coke. (I see that the practice of corporate-sponsored blogs is spreading -- the Daily Oklahoman's website has five blogs, including a husband and wife team. I'm guessing that not included among the topics these bloggers will discuss is criticism of the Daily Oklahoman, Opryland, the Grand Old Opry, WSM Radio, the Broadmoor Hotel, Gaylord Sports Management, or any of the other far-flung enterprises of the South Central Ohio Coal, Gas, Electricity, Telephone & Telegraph Communications Group OPUBCO.)

Anyway, the movie: We both loved it. I've read the books (all five books of the trilogy), listened to the entire radio series, and watched the entire BBC TV series. Mikki saw some of the TV series, but I think fell asleep for most of it, as parents tend to do when they're finally allowed to sit still and quiet for a few moments. The movie is not the same as all of the above, but they managed -- meaning Douglas Adams, who wrote the radio series, then transformed it into books, TV, and finally a screenplay -- to capture the most important bits and weave them into a coherent movie-length story using some new plot devices.

The casting was well done. Martin Freeman, sad-sack Tim from "The Office," is perfect as sad-sack Arthur Dent.

I'm not sure how they did it, but they managed to make Marvin, the robot, look dejected and resigned despite the lack of an actual face. You will see an android shrug and hang its head. (It was nice to see a Sirius Cybernetics Corporation product from the TV series make a cameo appearance.)

The Vogons play a bigger role in the film than in the book, and it works well. You get the full sense of the Vogon bureaucratic mentality at work, down to a homeworld filled with what looks like a collection of every American civic building built during the '60s and '70s.

Even if you haven't read the books or heard the radio series or seen the TV series, you'll still enjoy the movie.

It seemed timely to come across this during the Presbyterian Church in America's annual general assembly:

That's a screenshot from a Chinese bootleg DVD of the new Star Wars release, "The Backstroke of the West," with English subtitles translated back from the dubbed Chinese dialogue. winterson.com has this and ten more screenshots and explains why the Presbyterian Church makes an appearance in Star Wars -- it's the back-translation of the Chinese translation of "Jedi Council". (Hat tip to Language Hat.)

Makes sense. The Jedi Council sort of looks like a presbytery meeting -- you have a group of men (must have been PCA or OPC Jedis) conversing in serious tones about serious issues, and an emphasis on doing things "decently and in order." I'll bet more than one teaching elder in some of our far-flung presbyteries has wished he could attend presbytery holographically.

What do you suppose we'd find in the subtitles from the rest of the movie and the rest of the series? Did they translate "Trade Federation" into "Auburn Avenue Pastors Conference"? Does Obi-Wan say at the end, "Only a Sith believes in strict subscription!" Did Luke's sojurn on the ice world of Hoth make him the Frozen Chosen One? Does the "D." in D. James Kennedy stand for "Darth"?

Feel free, especially you fellow Calvinists out there, to make up your own jokes and post them in the comments.

(Oh, the title refers to an 18th century split in the Presbyterian Church between supporters of the Great Awakening revivalist preachers -- the New Side -- and those who believed revivalists were undermining established church order -- the Old Side.)

Father Shane Tharp at Catholic Ragemonkey paints a vivid picture:

Every priest has a couple of bridezilla stories, that is, brides who went on a rampage because they got the notion in their heads that their wedding day was meant to fulfill every pretty, pretty princess dreams and when things don't go their way, Tokyo must pay the price.

I'm proud to say that neither Bridezilla nor Groomzilla were present at our nuptials 16 years ago. And the even-tempered young bride who asked our four-year-old daughter to be a flower girl back in January wasn't the least bit perturbed at her attack of stage fright at the rehearsal (she got over it), nor bothered by her decision not to drop any petals from her basket during the procession.

To balance out my boasting of my score on the online IQ test, I feel compelled to direct you to this entry I wrote in my first month of blogging: "Smarts ain't all they're cracked up to be."

I think I've found the brainiest blog on the Internet. The blogger, named Tom, writes about favorite foods (often!), taxes, family, pets, pop culture, and his longing for a meaningful relationship. Here's a recent entry:

So, I was hanging out with Keith Richards last night, and I asked him something I've wondered as long as I've known him: "Why haven't you ever eaten Mick Jagger's brains?"

And Keith told me -- get this -- he told me he's not a zombie.

I know! What the hell! You could've knocked me over with a feather. I mean, he looks like a zombie, he smells like a zombie... I just figured: zombie.

I was so shocked, I forgot to eat his brains. Maybe next week. We're going to Golf n' Stuff on Tuesday.

I guess he was on TV recently:

I still say, if Dr. Phil didn't want to have his brains eaten, he shouldn't have gotten all up in my grill about being an undeadbeat dad.

That's from Tom the Zombie, and I found his blog, zombie eat brains, in a collection of undead links in a recent entry at Incoming Signals, a daily assortment of amazing links from around the web.

Full disclosure: I am posting this for my own self-preservation. (UPDATE: Maybe not! And Dwayne, if he shows up at my front door, he'll be handed a map to your house. And a PikePass.)

Your IQ Is 140

Your Logical Intelligence is Genius Your Verbal Intelligence is Genius Your Mathematical Intelligence is Genius Your General Knowledge is Genius

(Hat tip: Jack Bennett of Idle Mendacity, a New York City conservative Catholic blogger who has me on his blogroll. In recent entries he mourns the passing of Frank Gorshin and the hi-JACK-ing of the oldies format at WCBS-FM. Thanks for the link, Jack, and I've blogrolled you, too.)

I still haven't bothered to visit the Huffington Post, Arianna Huffington's Left Coast glitterati group blog, so I can't even link to it. But I have discovered its parody site -- Huffington's Toast, and it's on my blogroll.

It reminds of National Lampoon's Letters section, from that magazine's heyday in the late 1970s -- brief opinions purporting to be from celebrities. (It took me a few issues to figure out that the letters weren't really by the celebrities named, and, no, that wasn't really Jimmy Carter's cousin writing a monthly column about his misadventures with Brother Billy.)

Huffington's Toast features blog entries that are explicitly labeled "not really by" famous folks. It's written by some of the best satirists in the blogosphere. (See their links under "Arianna and Her Stooges" in the site's right sidebar.)

I especially enjoyed the exchange between evil galactic warlord Xenu* and Sc**nt*l*gy devotee Tom Cruise*, and political consultant Bob Shrum*'s prescription for the Democratic Party. Don't overlook the mugshots for each writer. (In Andrew Sullivan's case, that's the mugshot of Paul "Pee Wee Herman" Reubens, from his 1991 indecent exposure arrest.)

It's frequently updated and always good for a laugh.

(* Not really.)

I wondered about the same thing:

Re: Coruscant apartment codes. The architecture of the city is one of those giddy treats for city geeks. All those sleek Moderne towers and endless urban canyons. One of the best sequences consisted of Vader and Padme looking into the city, considering their fates; the camera moved slowly between the towers, for no particular reason; what, do the astral project when troubled? But any excuse for a flythrough. It�s just a cool place. But. BUT. For God�s sake, why aren�t there any railings anywhere? You build a docking pad so people can visit your 127th floor apartment, but you don�t build a railing? It�s windy up there. I�d get out of my car and crawl on my belly to the porch, and I wouldn�t stand up until I saw something I could grab. Like the hostess.

Read all of James Lileks' "disconnected observations" on "Revenge of the Sith" in today's Bleat.

Is there anything you can do with games that are missing pieces? Dwayne the Canoe Guy has a brilliant answer to that question: He's bagging them -- 20 to a package -- and selling them at scrapbooking stores. You can see a photo of one of his packages, which includes cards from the '70s Parker Brothers board game The Inventors and tiles from Trippples.

It's fascinating to comb through the raw server logs for my website. awstats does a pretty good job of summarizing who's visiting, where visitors are coming from, and what they're looking at, but the detail in the raw log allows me to put it all together.

For example, it allows me to see that someone behind the Tulsa Whirled's firewall (209.184.242.253) got to BatesLine via Google searches for "Bobby Lorton" (on June 2) and "robert e. lorton iii" (on June 3). A bit of vanity Googling, perhaps? BatesLine is the first result for both of those searches, thanks to tulsaworld.com walling itself off from the Internet and sounding retreat in the battle for Googlespace.

Then there was this intriguing search: lorton tulsa klan. On my site, that leads to a couple of category archive pages, where the words are all mentioned, but nowhere near each other.

Just below my result was this: A 1993 issue of a newsletter devoted to the murder of Hollywood silent film star, director, and Casanova William Desmond Taylor, shot to death in 1922. Taylor's death came not long after the trial of Fatty Arbuckle, and Hollywood was regarded around the country as a modern day Babylon.

The newsletter includes a collection of headlines, editorials, and one-liners from newspaper coverage of the Taylor murder. Within days of the killing, newspapers from Boston to Seattle to Wichita to Savannah were responding with pointed, punny comments about Taylor, Hollywood morals, and the investigation:

February 4, 1922, DES MOINES REGISTER: The recent movie tragedy was too realistic for the director's health.

February 6, 1922, RICHMOND TIMES-DISPATCH: The question now is, who saw Director Taylor last. Until recently, the burning issue among the movie queens was, who saw him first.

February 7, 1922, PITTSBURGH SUN: Nowadays a great many screen luminaries are being tried and found wanton.

February 8, 1922, BOSTON HERALD: A "gruelling" examination, as the police employ the term, is one expected to put its recipient in the soup.

February 9, 1922, INDIANAPOLIS STAR: A movie funeral seems to be one thing that will get the Los Angeles people out to church.

February 16, 1922, BOSTON ADVERTISER: Police in Hollywood have not thought of questioning the movie bathing girls. Experience proves they conceal little.

Apparently there was a flimsy but important piece of evidence in the case:

February 10, 1922, COLUMBIA STATE: In the modern murder case it is not only cherchez la femme, but cherchez la lingerie.

February 11, 1922, DES MOINES TRIBUNE: Incidentally, the Hollywood tragedy has brought home to some women the advisability of omitting initials from nighties.

There's more from the nation's newspapers in that issue, including a short excerpt from a Tulsa World writer named Otis Lorton.

You Are a Pundit Blogger!

Your blog is smart, insightful, and always a quality read. Truly appreciated by many, surpassed by only a few.

(HT: Badger Blogger, a blog devoted to Wisconsin politics and media criticism.)

Alt-comic icon Zippy the Pinhead was in the neighborhood recently, having a chat with the Golden Driller. Tulsa Time has the comic, from May 24, along with Zippy's visit to the Blue Whale in Catoosa, from July 15, 2002.

Commentary from around the Internet about the final movie in the "Star Wars" series:

Albert Greenland, guest-writing at The Galvin Opinion, says that Star Wars is great art because of the truth it tells about human nature, about sin and redemption:

...the genius of Star Wars is that it somehow manages to explain why we sin and what sin does to us. Graham Greene once wrote that "love makes more mistakes than hate does." In that light, the fall of Anakin related to the fact that he loved too much. And that love, combined with a few of the deadly sins, especially "pride," was the witch's brew which Anakin willingly drunk....

Three years ago, after the release of Episode II, Jonathan V. Last made "The Case for the Empire," arguing that "[t]he deep lesson of Star Wars is that the Empire is good."
He updates that perspective for Episode III with a commentary on NPR: "A Flawed Despot is Better than a Smug Jedi." Money quote: "You can bet Lord Vader makes the trains run on time." His review of Episode III for the Weekly Standard is here. (Hat tip for this and the following item to Galley Slaves, to which Last is a contributor.)

More contrarian views of the Jedi and the Sith:

Orson Scott Card: "The Jedi may claim to be in favor of democracy, but in fact they function as a ruling elite, making their decisions among themselves. They occasionally submit to the authority of the legislature, and they seem to respect the rule of law, though whose law it�s hard to say. By and large, however, they decide among themselves what they�re going to do and when it�s OK to break the law and defy the civilian authority."

Julian Sanchez on Hit and Run makes the case for allowing the separatists to secede peacefully.

Sanchez links to Tyler Cowen, who says of the Jedi, "Aren't they a kind of out-of-control Supreme Court, not even requiring Senate approval (with or without filibuster), and heavily armed at that? As I understand it, they vote each other into the office, have license to kill, and seek to control galactic affairs. Talk about unaccountable power used toward secret and mysterious ends."

Finally, Ace of Spades links to video of Triumph the Insult Comic Dog working the crowd of costumed Star Wars fans waiting to get into the first showing on opening night of Episode II. A bit blue, but Ace says it's "maybe the funniest thing ever shown on Conan O'Brien."

A blog I told you about last week, The Darth Side, has reached its inevitable and tragic conclusion, and the full text is now available in PDF format, in normal chronological order (the beginning is at the top). The PDF version also contains "extras," including an interview with the author, Cheeseburger Brown.

I finally saw "Attack of the Clones" last week -- yes, that's episode II, not III. My son has already seen it with his grandfather and wants to me to take him to see III again. I thought I ought to see II first. I don't remember where I read this, but it's true -- there's something about Yoda leaping about in a light sabre fight that reminds one of Miss Piggy doing karate. ("Hiiiii-YA!")

The quote of the day comes from an unnamed aide to Washington Sen. Maria Cantwell, about Cantwell being spotted in an Italian restaurant in D.C., dining with disgraced New Jersey Senator Bob Torricelli, where the two were said to be "all over each other":

"Yes, we can confirm that Sen. Cantwell did see both Torricelli and Lautenberg at Galileo, but it was not a date. Cannoli is not the same thing as canoodling."

(From Lloyd Grove's Lowdown in today's New York Daily News.)

Amanda of Wittingshire has an eight-year-old son too, and he is completely unimpressed by the idea of girls in bikinis:

He was still staring at me, utterly flabbergasted. Finally he found his tongue: "It disturbs me," he said formally, "that you are telling me that one day I will think girls look pretty in bikinis. That disturbs me. I know what I think, and I don't think that."

By this point I was laughing out loud. He was so serious, and so affronted.

"It isn't funny," he said. "Why on earth would I suddenly think girls in bikinis look pretty? They look cold. They look naked. Skin is just skin, and tummy skin isn't any prettier than arm skin. That's what I think. Why would I ever think different?"

(HT: The Happy Husband, in a post with a whole bunch of marriage-related links.)

Dan Lovejoy reports that Sen. Tom Coburn's idea of combining pizza with STD is nothing new where he works.

Came across an intriguing new blogger the other day.

He writes about barbecues and parenthood. He muses about annoying coworkers, incompetent subordinates, and the inscrutable ways of his boss. He thinks about his mom every day. He struggles with badly-built prosthetic devices. According to his Blogger profile, "He enjoys fixing things, listening to music, and crushing people's tracheas with his mind."

Cross over to The Darth Side. You'll be glad you did.

Basic Hip Digital Oddio, home of the Space Age Pop Music webcast and the Online Guide to Whistling Records, is spending 2005 celebrating records for children from the golden age -- the mid '40s to the early '50s.

Kiddie Records Weekly presents a classic kids' album each week, from the days when albums really were -- albums, that is, books of discs to be played at 78 RPM. Each side of each record is available as an MP3 for download, and you can download images of the cover art and labels, too. Highlights of the series so far:

• The Happy Prince by Oscar Wilde, directed and narrated by Orson Welles and featuring Bing Crosby as the prince. The musical score is by Bernard Herrmann.
• Gerald Mc Boing Boing by Dr. Seuss, read by Harold Peary (the Great Gildersleeve).
• Pecos Bill, featuring Roy Rogers and the Sons of the Pioneers.
• Fanny Brice as Baby Snooks: Baby Snooks learns to tell the truth, to be good, to be clean, table manners, about crossing streets, and to be kind to animals.

There will be a new album each week through the end of the year.

Basic Hip's space age pop album of the week, up through Monday on the home page, is "Shock Music in Hi-Fi" by the Creed Taylor Orchestra. The cover warns, "Don't dare listen to this music alone!" You can download tracks as stereo 128 kbps MP3s or listen to the album as a lower-quality mono stream.

(Hat tip to Joel Blain.)

A robin built a nest right next to our patio door, in a spot where the gutter downspout angles in from the edge of the roof to the side of the house. This photo is from last Monday afternoon.

Longmire has added to his collection of altered romance novel covers, and there are more reader submissions as well.

And he's got a link to some award-winningly bad, but genuine, romance novel covers, one of which is below:

Here are the worst of 2002, of 2001, and of 2000.

(Hat tip to honest + popular of It's Rude to Point, who is still on my blogroll even though she inexplicably de-blogrolled me not long after she inexplicably blogrolled me.)

The food pyramid is going away, and Sean Gleeson has uncovered the U. S. Department of Agriculture's new visual guide to what's good for us: "USDA to unveil Nutrition Frowny Face." Visit the Gleeson Bloglomerate to see the poster for the selected concept, as well as posters for a couple of the rejected prototypes -- the "Nutrition Ceiling Fan" and the "Nutrition Martini."

(Hat tip: Dan and Angi.)

Joe Carter of the Evangelical Outpost has been recycling bits from a newspaper humor/advice column he used to write, and today he's got some choice excerpts with links to the full column.

For example:

On napping -- For a woman, catching her husband napping is the second worst thing she can catch her man doing in their bed. (The first, of course, is discovering him drinking grape Kool-Aid on the 300 thread count Egyptian cotton sheets. Finding him with another woman, however, runs a close third.) Women believe that the only reason a man would want to take a nap is because he is either trying to ignore her or is avoiding spending time with her. The truth is that men take naps because we are tired. Too tired, in fact, to think of more creative ways to ignore our wives and avoid spending time with them.

Here's the last strip in the series. Albert's done with his taxes. Hope you are too.

Pogo by Walt Kelly, April 14, 1956.

The IRS never makes it easy....

Pogo by Walt Kelly, April 13, 1956. Y'all enjoying these? Let me hear from you. By the way, the distortion and greyness in the last frame is the result of scanning out of a book. I'm learning how to use the GIMP, and I suspect there's a way to correct for that, but I haven't figured it out yet.

Another Pogo strip to help ease your tax preparation woes. I'm done, but Albert is still figgerin'. I needed tax advice this good.

Pogo by Walt Kelly, April 12, 1956. Alas, most Pogo books are out of print, but you can find some new and used by searching for "Walt Kelly" at Amazon.

A tip of the hat to Mee Citee Wurkor for calling attention to Gizoogle, which translates any web page into gangsta-ese.

I wonder, I thought, whether the drollery of Dustbury would survive such a transformation. I was not disappointed. (Warning: The translator generates some foul language.)

(The anti-framing technology of the site means you can't use Gizoogle to translate B-to-tha-izzatesLine. Sorry.)

In the spirit of the season, Bobby of Tulsa Topics has posted a Western Swing tune called "Taxes, Taxes," performed by Hank Penny.

Pogo by Walt Kelly, April 11, 1956. Note the correct use of apostrophes in the word "LI'L'."

I'm going to be a little busy for the next day or two...

Pogo, by Walt Kelly, April 10, 1956

If you learned Latin, you probably learned about Horatio (Horatius Cocles), the brave Roman soldier who single-handedly fended off the Etruscan army as the Romans destroyed the bridge across the Tiber behind him. As a reward for his bravery, Horatio received as much land as he could plow around in a day.

... or so Livy wrote. But ancient Roman Army memoranda, published in the January 1953 issue of the British Army Journal, reveal what happened after Horatio's reward went through proper channels.

(You'll find the title in its original bureaucratese here, and its author here.)

I just came across a terrific tribute to Pogo, Walt Kelly's classic comic strip. The author, one Neddie Jingo, says that it's a shame if the only thing you know about Pogo is, "We have met the enemy and he is us":

As a technician, Kelly's contribution to the cartoonist's craft is probably even greater than George Herriman's; Kelly's influence is just howlingly obvious in the way Bill Watterson's Calvin and Hobbes characters moved, and how his strips were laid out -- hell, even in his use of vegetation as a framing device. Pioneering, too, was his characters' proscenium-breaking; when Albert Alligator, lighting his see-gar, reaches out and strikes his match on the panel border, you're seeing a form so confident in its maturity that it can afford to be playful. ...

It's in the realm of language that Kelly truly shone. His daily strip was a wonderful mangrove of puns and portmanteaux, all delivered in a disarming parody of Southern speech (Kelly was himself from Bridgeport, Connecticut -- not exactly a hotbed of Southern literary tradition), and his poetry and song lyrics were so rich with utterly effortless linguistic play that it's impossible not to nominate him as America's answer to Lewis Carroll.

The tribute features several Pogo strips and other artwork. You'll find the place-name-heavy lyrics to the song "Go, Go, Pogo" -- along with a link to an MP3 of the song, sung by Walt Kelly hisself.

Hat tip to whomever reached this site with a search for this bit of Pogo poetry:

How pierceful grows the hazy yon! How myrtle petaled thou! For spring hath sprung the cyclotron, How high browse thou, brown cow?

You'll find more Pogo poetry at languagehat.com. And if you're looking for the jingle for Wummies ("They're gristle to your mill!"), look no further.

You'll find my own tribute to the Possum here.

In other whimsical news, I am pleased to announce that BatesLine is the number one Google result for "Gruntfuttock."

This week's featured episode of "Round the Horne" on BBC7 is one of my favorites -- "From Russia with Love," from 1965 -- featuring one of their best spy spoofs, in which Kenneth Horne, Master Spy, gets to the bottom of a sudden outbreak of truth, which is threatening the British way of life. Horne listens in horror as the outbreak hits a radio reporter covering a society wedding:

Reporter (Kenneth Williams): I'm standing in the freezing cold outside St. Borrols Westminster with an unctuous grin on my face, preparing to give you snobs at home details of yet another dreary society wedding, between Daphne, the eldest daughter of the Duke of Stokely, and Alistair Twick, the son -- he says -- of that senile old pantaloon, the Earl of McWhirter. And here they come now, the spotty fat bride, her face suffused with acne, clinging desperately to the arm of old Blubberlips, the chinless wonder. What an array of glittering nobodies are here today! Yes, what a waste of everybody's time. Still, if I do it often enough, I might cop for a knighthood.

As befits the genre, Master Spy Horne finds time for a bit of romance:

We clung together passionately. My mouth searched for hers, and found it exactly where I'd suspected it would be -- under her nose.

The episode also features an interview with King Grunt-Futtock of Peasmoldia, an autonomous kingdom within Great Britain, who introduces Buttercup, his "good lady wife" and queen consort: "We'll waive the kissin' of her hand, seein' as how grubby it is."

You've got Monday and Tuesday to catch this one before the next episode is broadcast on Wednesday. You'll find it on the BBC7 Wednesday "listen again" page.

By the way, keep your eye on BBC7's listings for radio adaptations of great books. A week or so ago, they serialized C. S. Lewis's Perelandra, and at the moment they're in the midst of G. K. Chesterton's The Man Who Was Thursday.

Some comic relief for a Saturday -- two galleries of Children's literature, Part I and Part II.

Hat tip to Random Mentality.

I just came across an excellent retrospective of Kenneth Horne's two sketch comedy series, "Beyond Our Ken" and "Round the Horne." It's a three-hour program called "Horne of Plenty" and you'll find it on BBC 7's Saturday "listen again" page through this Friday. The program includes the very first and very last episodes of both programs in their entirety, plus details of the history of the shows.

If you ever want to grab a RealAudio program for later listening, there's an excellent utility program called Streambox VCR Suite 2, which you can find various places on the web.

Today was the 40th anniversary of the first broadcast of "Round the Horne," one of the most enduringly popular radio shows of all time. As you might guess, any popular radio show that had its premiere only 40 years ago is obviously not American. In the '60s, the BBC still produced high-quality original radio entertainment, and they still do today.

"Round the Horne" was a sketch comedy half-hour produced for the BBC Light Entertainment Programme (later BBC Radio 2). It starred Kenneth Horne and a crew of veteran West End actors who could do an unbelievable range of voices and accents. The writers for the first three series were Barry Took, who was instrumental in the creation of "Monty Python's Flying Circus," and Marty Feldman, whom you may know from "Young Frankenstein" and "Silent Movie."

I was first introduced to the show by several of my British co-workers. When I told one of them today about the 40th anniversary, he said, "I used to listen to those on Sunday afternoons when I was a kid. Suddenly I feel very old."

If you like "Monty Python's Flying Circus," if you enjoy clever word-play and double-entendre, you will love "Round the Horne." Trust me.

Time and distractions do not permit a thorough tribute, so I direct you to the BBC 7 website, where you can find a different episode of "Round the Horne" each week. You can listen live on Wednesdays at 8 am, noon and 7 pm London time, or you can go to the "Listen Again" page for Wednesdays to hear the most recently broadcast episode in RealAudio format.

UPDATE: Having now listened to the tribute show I mentioned in this space, I decided to take down the link. It's deadly to comedy to explain it, but it's even deadlier to explain it in a way that serves modern political correctness. You'll enjoy listening to repeats of the original broadcasts much more. If you want even more from the cast of "Round the Horne," listen to "Beyond our Ken," the series that preceded it. The writing isn't as brilliant, but it's still a very funny show. It's on BBC 7 on Sundays.

I have one very spam-ridden e-mail account. I've had the address for over a decade, and it must be in every spam database in the world. About a year ago, I started getting spam that matched a certain pattern.

• The name in the from line always had a first name, middle initial, and last name.
• The first and last names appeared to be random words out of the dictionary.
• The body of the message was usually in Russian, but sometimes in English.
• The message always seemed to originate from a PC connected to broadband Internet service, no doubt infected with a trojan horse mail relay program.

As evil as it is to write and disseminate a trojan horse, I give these crooks credit for an algorithm that combines random words to generate names that more often than not bring a chuckle.

I wrote about this phenomenon a while back:

The names in the From line are wonderful -- Stying K. Purgative, Mustered O. Behemoths, Headwaters I. Evidence, Circularizing T. Integers, Disassemble H. Imps, Rallies Q. Stratification, Accretions G. Recital -- they are obviously not names, but they have the rhythm of names, reminiscent of the sort that Barry Took and Marty Feldman cooked up for sketches on "Round the Horne", like Isambard Mousehabit and J. Peasemould Gruntfuttock. (Or the Li'l' Abner character, Jubilation T. Cornpone.) So we know the spambot writer is evil, but has a sense of humor.

Below are some genuine examples of these spam names, followed by whatever popped into my head when I read each. Feel free to play along in the comments.

Pauperized A. Classicists

Why I double-majored in computer science.

Vivified E. Washtub

What happened the next time the Sorcerer's Apprentice put on the hat.

Antislavery H. Sarsaparillas

The "Ben and Jerry's Rainforest Crunch" of the 1850s.

Yosemite F. Faun

From the Looney Tunes production of The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe.

Horseman H. Screaming

"Saddlehorn!! Saddlehorn!!"

Lynching A. Ogles

"What do you mean, 'It is too a crime to look?'"

Scooby Doo goes gonzo, maps galore, romance novel covers get retitled, and other assorted links -- after the jump.

I had a nice dinner out tonight with Mikki while her folks watched the kids. We went to Doe's Eat Place, which has only recently opened on Cherry Street. I should have done a bit of research first -- lots more food than we wanted and way more than we wanted to spend. It was a good meal, and we had a very good waitress, but two entrees, a small appetizer, and two sodas set us back about $50 before tip. (Note to non-Tulsans -- that is a lot to pay for dinner for two around here.) Doe's has a very limited menu -- for entrees, just steak and shrimp. The smallest steak you can order at Doe's (not counting the filet mignon) is two pounds of meat. It's expected that you'll be sharing that with someone, and we did, but still.... Doe's is a chain, but started as a place in Greenville, Mississippi, that served steaks and tamales. We had a half-dozen tamales (with chili) as an appetizer -- not bad.

After dinner, we had a leisurely browse at Borders, but left empty-handed. (We have plenty of books already. You have no idea.)

The highlight of Doe's (other than a chance to converse intelligently without kid interruptions) was an aviation map of Wales and southern England in the lobby. When we were told it would be a few minutes before we'd get a table, I said, "That's OK, I could stay here looking at this all evening." On the map I spotted RAF Shawbury near Shrewsbury in Shropshire (say that three times fast), where I spent a week on a job assignment in May 1999. The wait for the table gave me enough time to retrace my routes and remember a trip that featured lots of walking around the lovely Tudor city of Shrewsbury, a hurried evening visit to the international book town of Hay-on-Wye and a more leisurely day's drive through north Wales: A ride on the Talyllyn Railway, a narrow-gauge railway made famous by the Thomas the Tank Engine books, and a stroll to nearby Dolgoch Falls; a walk along Tywyn's beach; a couple of hours in The Village, a drive past the mirror-smooth waters of Llyn Gwynant; and a dinner of fish, chips, and mushy peas in a cafe in Betws-y-Coed. (When I first saw the mushy peas, I marvelled that they served guacamole in those parts.)

You can never tell whose fancy you're going to tickle with a blog entry, especially an entry that is not the usual stuff of the blog. My little homage to Dr. Gene Scott, television fundraiser (and occasional preacher) extraordinaire, went unremarked and unlinked. But then I got a very enthusiastic trackback from Sciolist of the Rough Woodsman, who echoes my sentiments about Doc's teaching on communion, along with his own remembrances.

Charles G. Hill gives a farewell salute to Robert Butkin, who is resigning as State Treasurer to become dean of TU's law school, which will allow him to work in the same town where his family lives. He's a Democrat I might have voted for, if I'd had the chance. (In 1994, I voted for his Republican opponent, whom he narrowly beat.) Butkin was unopposed in 1998, but my friend Rick Koontz and I wore Butkin re-election campaign T-shirts across the state on our weekend trip that summer to visit the remainder of Oklahoma's 77 counties which we hadn't yet visited. (Major County was number 77 for both of us.) When you handle billions in state funds, there are ample opportunities for kickbacks, and many of our State Treasurers took those opportunities. Robert Butkin has been one of Oklahoma's few honorable and honest State Treasurers. I hope we get another one like him.

Pocket-sized need not apply: Some guys are just into BBWs -- big Bible women. (12 MB Windows Media file, via X-ATI Guy.) Lyric excerpt:

I like big Bibles
And I cannot lie.
You Christian brothers can't deny
That when a girl walks in with a KJV
And a bookmark in Proverbs
You get stoked.
Got her name engraved
So you know this girl is saved.
It looks like one of those large ones
With plenty of space in the margins.

For your entertainment:

RetroCrush is presenting a list of the top 100 TV theme songs (mainly American TV). Numbers 100 through 20 have been posted already, and most entries in the list have links to websites about the shows. (Hat tip: Garfield Ridge via Ace.)

And that led me to this....

The official "Tonight Show with Johnny Carson" website has clips of Carson as Carnac and other great moments from his years as Tonight Show host.

In the silly simile department, Cheat Seeking Missiles has a collection of howlers written by high schoolers. A few samples:

5. She had a deep, throaty, genuine laugh, like that sound a dog makes just before it throws up.

20. The plan was simple, like my brother-in-law Phil. But unlike Phil, this plan just might work.

23. The ballerina rose gracefully en pointe and extended one slender leg behind her, like a dog at a fire hydrant.

If you need a fright rather than a laugh, Ace has the definitive photo of Democrat political consultant Susan Estrich. Don't be sipping anything when you click that link. Commenter Ray Midge notices a resemblance to another TV monster.

(Per assignment.)

Really. I used to really enjoy sitting down with a newspaper. I'm out of the habit now, and I'm getting to where I hardly read papers online. Some scattered reminiscences:

My great-grandmother, Minnie McGee, could have been a syndicated columnist. She had been writing letters to the Nowata Daily Star under the name Aunt Millie. Her letters usually began with, "I may be wrong -- I usually am...." They were really little op-eds, and the paper liked them well enough that they ran them, despite a policy against publishing anonymous letters. Family lore holds that she was offered a syndication deal, but turned it down.

I grew up with the Tribune and the Sunday World. Dad didn't get around early enough to read the paper over breakfast, and he could always find a copy of the Daily World at work to read, so we didn't subscribe to it. (Was that OK?) The Tribune he had time to read when he got home from work. I learned to read upside down so that I could read the funnies before he was done with them.

In college, our fraternity subscribed to the Boston Globe and later added the tabloid Herald at the urging of some brothers native to the area. Scattered about the fraternity commons you'd also find the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal -- and the Tulsa Tribune. I subscribed by mail so I could keep up with politics back home -- I kept my voter registration in Oklahoma and voted by absentee ballot. During a prolonged stay in the infirmary, a fraternity brother brought by a paper every morning. Sunday afternoons at the fraternity were lazy and quiet, brothers slumped on the chairs and sofas in commons, paging their way through the Sunday editions, while gnawing on fresh bagels from Kupel's Bakery. (Our ZBT chapter had a bagel chairman responsible for making the Sunday morning run to Kupel's.)

I still appreciate it when I'm traveling and the hotel provides copies of the local paper, instead of or in addition to USA Today. Hampton Inns are usually pretty good about that. I enjoy getting a sense of the local politics, and, if I visit often enough or stay long enough, to begin to know who the players are. Even if the presentation is one-sided, you can still get a feel for what the big issues are.

I loved reading the English-language Filipino newspapers during my summer in Manila. Despite 50 years as an American possession, they had developed a completely different set of English phrases for talking about the political process, plus you had the Filipino habit of referring to politicians by their nicknames, even in the classier papers. "Ninoy" -- Benigno Aquino -- was much in the news that summer of 1983, as he prepared to return home from exile in the United States. (A visit to the websites of Manila's papers reveals that a lot of homogenization with the rest of the English-speaking world has taken place.)

My favorite British paper: The Daily Telegraph.

That's all I got. Other Okie bloggers are writing much better stuff on the topic, and I'll post links tomorrow.

For your amusement: If you're wondering what this "blog" thing is, Frank J. has some timely warnings. For example:

* Blogs can simply turn on you at anytime for any reason. They attack without thought or provocation. Thus, make sure to always stay away from them and to disparage them in the media.

* A blog will use a dark art called the "hyperlink" to "link" to what you say in an attempt to slander you. If you see any blog using a hyperlink against you, immediately contact law enforcement to get them to stop.

* If you see a geeky looking male or a slutty looking female in front of a laptop, he or she could be a blogger. Don't make eye contact or say anything in front of them or they will destroy you.

John Owen Butler has declared this week's Okie Blogger Bash Consortium topic to be childhood diseases. I punted last week's, a topic (voting) about which I have had quite a lot to say, but you can find links to last week's entries here. I especially liked Jan's entry on voting for judges. I do wish judicial candidates would at least declare their philosophical leanings.

On to childhood diseases: I had horrible tracheal bronchitis at age 6 months, so much so that Mom was worried I wouldn't survive and so had way too many studio pictures taken of me.

Kindergarten was the year of chicken pox -- I vaguely remember taking a bath in tepid water with baking soda -- and the tonsillectomy.

The tonsillectomy was kind of fun. It was my first trip to the hospital. It was going to be in St. John, but when Mom found out she couldn't stay with me in the room, they moved me to St. Francis. After the surgery, I got to soothe my sore throat with a popsicle (orange, if I recall correctly) and was given a little stuffed goat. (Mom and Dad, feel free to write in with details I've forgotten.)

I missed all the major childhood diseases. I got mono in 7th grade, but, sadly, not because I'd been kissed. (I won't tell you how long it was until I had been, because it's too pathetic, although not atypical for a nerd boy like me. The young lady responsible reads this blog.)

Most of the interesting childhood diseases we heard about belonged to my mom's kindergarten students. It was always exciting to hear about the year's first case of chicken lice at Catoosa Elementary School and the joy of combing the children's hair, checking for nits.

Our kids have suffered from various upper respiratory ailments, including allergies and mild asthma, but all those immunizations have kept the bad stuff away, thank God. Wander through a hundred-year-old cemetery some time, note the large number of child graves, then praise God for working through scientists and physicians to turn childhood mortality from a sad but common occurrence into a rare tragedy.

TRACKBACK: Inkling of the Rough Woodsman links to this post and takes on anti-immunization zealots.

From the latest newsletter of the Annals of Improbable Research, a medical journal article deemed worthy of our attention:

"Demonstration of Oesophageal Reflux Using Live Snakes," A.C. Johnson and S. Johnson, Clinical Radiology, vol. 20, no. 1, January 1969, pp. 107-9.

If the Happy Homemaker's collection of vintage valentines isn't enough for you, Michele Catalano has more here. She calls them creepy, but some of them are kind of sweet, in a weird sort of early 20th century way. (Not the one with the electrocuted puppy, though. That's just horrible.) And they had anti-valentines back then, too. More here.

(Hat tip: Ace of Spades.)

In the same sweet Valentine's Day mood, Michele doesn't hold much hope for Cathy and Irving's future. (Not for the faint of heart or tender of ears.)

Happy Homemaker Jan remembers outdoor skating and other winter delights from growing up in the Upper Midwest:

I spent a good part of my childhood in the north: Ohio, Indiana, Wisconsin and Iowa. We always had some good snow up there, and snow was never a deterrent for outside play as it seems to be here in Oklahoma. We played outside all day in the snow, coming in only for tomato soup and hot chocolate. ...

As I recall, many friends had small ice skating rinks in their back yards. Before it froze, the rink bottom and sides were laid out (much like a kiddie pool) and it was filled with water. The whole thing was a couple inches deep. When it froze, we would just lace up our skates and go around all afternoon.

That's just a taste -- read it all, and I've posted a comment there, too.

Jan also tells of sharing her love for snowflakes (and snowflake photographs) with her son's kindergarten class.

The summary said:

High-Level Nerd. You are definitely MIT material, apply now!!!

I'll keep that in mind.

(Found via Joseph Hertzlinger, who is much nerdier than I am.)

PogoPossum.com, the official website of the classic Walt Kelly comic strip, is celebrating its first anniversary of operation by presenting the original 1955 strips in which we learn of Churchy La Femme's inordinate fear of Friday the 13th, which is more or less lucky depending on what day of the week it falls on in a given month. (Yes, you read that right.) The site also tells us how Kelly came up with the idea:

Some time in 1955, Walt and Helen Kelly were dining in a favorite restaurant in Stamford, Connecticut with their children -- Kathy, Carolyn and Peter, as well as Kathy's thirteen year old friend, Janet Safarik.

As usual with Walt around, the conversation engaged everyone and covered many subjects. At one point, Janet -- in reply to something long forgotten -- stated, "Well! At least, Friday the Thirteenth falls on a Saturday this month!"

Walt's ears pricked up and his full attention went to Janet. He was delighted! They discussed her concept deeply for a few moments and Walt thoughtfully made some notes on a napkin.

In February 2005, Friday the 13th falls on a Sunday, and I don't remember whether that's lucky or not.

As a resident of Oklahoma's Green Country, where our dirt is a lovely dark brown and we enjoy an abundance of non-Martian vegetation, I can laugh at this item on Sean Gleeson's blog.

One question for the scientists involved: Weren't the tumbleweeds and prairie dogs a tip-off that something was amiss?

...when the gate agent looks at your eyes and says, "I'm sorry, sir, but you're going to have to check those."

Putting my blogroll in recent-update order has called my attention back to blogs I marked long ago, but haven't read in a while.

You may have noticed a couple of dead bloggers on the blogroll. One of them is Samuel Pepys, the famous diarist of 17th century London. His blog posts the entry from his diary for today's date, 343 years ago.

Here's his entry for January 5, 1661/1662:

(Lord�s day). Left my wife in bed not well . . . and I to church, and so home to dinner, and dined alone upon some marrow bones, and had a fine piece of rost beef, but being alone I eat none. So after dinner comes in my brother Tom, and he tells me how he hath seen the father and mother of the girl which my cozen Joyces would have him to have for a wife, and they are much for it, but we are in a great quandary what to do therein, 200l. being but a little money; and I hope, if he continues as he begins, he may look out for one with more. To church, and before sermon there was a long psalm, and half another sung out while the Sexton gathered what the church would give him for this last year. I gave him 3s., and have the last week given the Clerk 2s., which I set down that I may know what to do the next year, if it please the Lord that I live so long; but the jest was, the Clerk begins the 25th psalm, which hath a proper tune to it, and then the 116th, which cannot be sung with that tune, which seemed very ridiculous. After church to Sir W. Batten�s, where on purpose I have not been this fortnight, and I am resolved to keep myself more reserved to avoyd the contempt which otherwise I must fall into, and so home and six and talked and supped with my wife, and so up to prayers and to bed, having wrote a letter this night to Sir J. Mennes in the Downs for his opinion in the business of striking of flags.

Some things I found interesting in this short entry:

• Samuel thinks his brother ought to hold out for a wife with a bigger dowry -- more than 200 pounds, which seems a pretty substantial sum for the time.
• Money is collected for the clergy's pay only once a year, and Pepys gave a grand total of 5 shillings (1/4 of a pound) for the clerk and sexton. (I assume that the church received more substantial funds from the state and from wealthy patrons.)
• The problem of church musicians choosing unsingable melodies or matching words with an ill-fitting tune has been around for a very long time.

The site is updated nearly every day, and each entry is generously annotated with hyperlinks for more information about the places and people Pepys writes about. It's a fascinating look into another time and place, but one that is not entirely foreign or incomprehensible.

Eight-year-old Joseph unveiled a riddle of his own invention:

Q. What kind of roach should you use when you're sealing tile?

A. A caulk-roach.

Setup needs some work -- why should you use a roach to seal tile? -- but chuckleworthy nonetheless.

The whole family went to see "Polar Express" in IMAX 3D last night. It's very impressive technically -- falling snow seeming to whirl around you, soaring with an eagle, zooming with the train down the world's steepest grade. It was way too intense and suspenseful for our four year old, who kept protesting that she was "too tired" to watch the movie -- which is her way of saying she's scared, but she won't say she's scared because she's a big girl and her big brother isn't scared. She spent a lot of the movie in Mommy's lap, facing away from the screen, occasionally looking back over her shoulder.

The movie is like a journey into a Thomas Kinkade painting -- everything's all warm and glowing. I did get drawn into the movie, although on reflection the story's a bit thin, and disbelief unsuspended itself at several points. When I saw thousands of identically-dressed elves massed in North Pole's central plaza, I sort of expected to hear praises to Kim Jong-Il. And when the main character whispers to Santa what he wants for Christmas, I leaned over to my wife and said, "You'll shoot your eye out, kid!"

A bit of accidental humor comes in a scene in Santa's monitoring room, when the elves on duty are alerted to a boy being naughty: He put gum in his sister's hair on Christmas eve. The boy's location: Maplewood, New Jersey, which happens to be the location of the school district that has banned perfomances of religious holiday music this year.

The South Orange and Maplewood school board shouldn't have any qualms about showing this movie at school. It is devoid of any religious references, other than the frequent use of the word "Christmas." No creches, no angels, no wise men, and especially no Jesus. In "Polar Express," Christmas is all about believing in Santa.

Still, if you can overlook that deficiency, it's an impressive film to see in IMAX 3D, and a family-friendly evening's entertainment.

UPDATE: Here's a review of the movie by Adeodatus. This quote will give you a sense of where he's coming from:

Let me say up front that I am not a big fan of the Santa myth as it has come down to us. About this time of year a few years back J. looked out the window on the drive to school and asked if Santa Claus was real. Sure he was real, I told him. I saw his bones in a box.

He goes on to compare "Polar Express" to other secular Christmas programs like "The Grinch That Stole Christmas" and "It's a Wonderful Life."

OOPS: Forgot to hat-tip Swamphopper of The Rough Woodsman for the link to Adeodatus's review.

Here's a fake news item about Google's plans to index rare books. It has an eerie relevance to events in Tulsa this week.

Google Brings 'Thrill of Public Library' to Your Desktop by Scott Ott

(2004-12-14) -- A cooperative venture between Google, the internet search engine company, and several major universities promises to bring "the thrill of the public library" to home and office, making it easier for millions of ordinary people to access the contents of books that few want to read.

"Studies show that 80 percent of U.S. families did not buy or read a book last year, and 58 percent of adults never read another book after high school," said a Google spokesman. "When this project is complete, we'll place tens of thousands of volumes of classic literature at their fingertips, where they can fail to read them in the privacy of their own homes."

If the project succeeds, the source said, public libraries could dispose of their collections of flammable dust-magnets (trade jargon for 'books') and could finally focus on their primary mission -- reheating homeless people while they surf the net at broadband speeds.

"And for those who enjoy a lazy afternoon reading a book, doing so online will enhance their enjoyment of this leisurely pursuit," said the Google source. "In fact, with a dial-up internet connection it could take as long as three leisurely minutes just to turn the page."

Scott Ott posts several satirical news items every day at ScrappleFace.com. (Unlike some humor sites on the Internet, you won't encounter vulgarity, obscenity, or profanity at ScrappleFace.com.) He has published a book of his best political satire, called Axis of Weasels. It's perfect for Christmas gift giving, and you can order it here.

BBC7, the digital radio service featuring comedy, drama, and kids programs, runs repeats of classic British radio comedy like "Round the Horne," "Hancock's Half Hour," "The Burkiss Way," "I'm Sorry I'll Read that Again," and "The Goon Show," audio versions of TV shows like "Dad's Army" and "Steptoe and Son," and comedy quizzes like "The News Quiz," "I'm Sorry I Haven't a Clue," and "Just a Minute" -- the latter involves speaking about an arbitrary subject for one full minute without hesitation, repetition, or deviation.

But until recently BBC7 went off the air from about midnight UK time until 7 in the morning -- in other words from 6 pm until 1 am Tulsa time -- the only time I could listen. And even if I was up late (not uncommon), the first programs of the day were the kids' shows.

Now BBC7 is not only 24 hours a day, but you can "listen again" to shows that aired in the course of the last week. So now you can hear a pre-Python John Cleese, along with all three of the Goodies before they were Goodies, on "I'm Sorry I'll Read That Again" at any convenient hour, day or night. Or listen to Rambling Syd Rumpo nadger his cordwangle in brilliant digital audio on this week's edition of "Round the Horne."

Over on Ephemeral Isle, we learn that Monday is Rover Appreciation Day. Not Rover, the dog, or Rover, the British car marque, but a big, white spherical thing that fans of a certain '60s cult TV show will remember, and that gave this son of a fan of that certain '60s cult TV show the nightmares for a time.

After Monday, look for the item in the December archive here, along with a charming account of a tea party held by the 2 1/2 year old daughter of the curator of Ephemeral Isle.

Over on The Corner, someone wanted to know if there were any Christmas carols that mention dogs. As a fan of Walt Kelly's comic strip Pogo, I of course remembered that each year Pogo and friends sang the Christmas classic "Deck Us All with Boston Charlie," while resident canine Beauregard always insisted that the correct lyrics began with "Bark Us All Bow-Wows of Folly." You can find all variations on the theme here, on the official Pogo website.

Also on the website was a link to this eBay auction, which closed Wednesday, for an extensive collection of Pogo paperbacks, Christmas cards, phonograph records, comic books, figurines, buttons, and other paraphernalia. The winning bid was $24,211.42, a bargain by the looks of it. It's worth clicking that link, just to look at the thumbnails of what was for sale. Good thing I didn't see it until after the auction had closed....

Back Friday evening from a short trip to Rogers, Arkansas, where we spent Thanksgiving Day with my wife's family. After the threat of snow on Wednesday, the weather was nice, with blue skies and beautiful sunsets.

Friday afternoon, my wife and I took a walk around downtown Rogers. Although Rogers must be one of the worst-planned cities in America, turning two decades of phenomenal growth and prosperity into ugly strip development that would make notably foul-mouthed urban critic Jim Kunstler invent new swear words and that will create traffic nightmares for years to come, Rogers has managed to preserve its old downtown. Not only are most of the 1890s buildings intact, they are filled with shops, offices, restaurants, and one interesting museum.

Downtown Rogers is home to the Daisy Museum, which displays the history of the famous air gun manufacturer, founded in Plymouth, Michigan, but since the late '50s based in Rogers. It's a well-organized and nicely displayed collection. As you'd expect the museum displays just about every product Daisy ever made, as well as air guns from the 18th and 19th centuries.

Even if you don't care about the guns, it's worth the visit to see the ads on display -- ads that put Daisy's products in the context of the hopes and dreams of American boys. There were ads for the Red Ryder carbine. For a 3-cent stamp, the ad explained, a boy could send off for a "Christmas reminder kit" -- cards with preprinted messages to Dad explaining the benefits of buying a Red Ryder carbine for you for Christmas. Leave one under the milk bottle or in Dad's easy chair.

Daisy didn't just target kids with their pitches: There was a cartoon ad showing a party of grownups happily firing a Daisy Targeteer, a low-powered air pistol, at a "targette", right there in the living room. Wifey sends hubby out for sandwiches -- the guests are having too much fun to leave.

(I wonder if Lileks has any Daisy ads in his collection. Maybe he can combine a visit to the museum with a tour of the bunny-sundering plant a few blocks away.)

In anticipation of Christmas, a leg lamp (the sort made famous in the movie "A Christmas Story") is on display in the front window of the museum, next to a special collector's edition set of Red Ryder and Little Beaver guns.

Also on display was Daisy's "American Boys' Bill of Rights":

WE, THE BOYS OF AMERICA - believe in these our rights: The right to Liberty, hard won by our forefathers + the right to happiness that comes with the growth of a healthy body & mind + the right to training, thoughtfully planned by parents, school & church + the right to opportunity, to live, learn, play and grown up in the time-honored traditions of a free people + and the right to learn to shoot safely. We recognize and accept the responsibility imposed by those Rights. But until we are old enough to vote we expect YOU, our fathers and mothers and other citizens who elect America's city, county, state & federal officers + to be eternally vigilant that our Rights be not abridged!

Daisy had marketing tie-ins not only with Red Ryder (comic strip and western movie series), but with Buck Rogers and Disney, too. There's a cute picture of Bobby and Annette in cowboy duds with Daisy guns in their holsters.

Daisy is still making guns, although they moved production from Rogers to Neosho, Missouri, some years ago.

A few doors down from the Daisy Museum is the old Victory Theatre. Not that many years ago it was a flea market -- used books, antiques, old records. Now it has been splendidly restored and is home to the Rogers Little Theatre.

Over on 1st Street, there's the Iron Horse Coffee Company, which has WiFi as well as coffee.

We walked into a western store and saw signs of the changing demographics of the area. The local Spanish language radio station was playing, and many of the displays for the cowboy duds were in Spanish rather than English. A mile or so west on Walnut, the Harp's Supermarket -- a typically sized supermarket from the '60s, part of a long-established area chain -- is now Harp's Supermercado. Panaderias are sprouting up around town, too.

We saw more than we wanted of the hideous strip development that now links Bentonville and Rogers along old US 71 as we looked for a place to eat lunch. The Thai restaurant we wanted to try was closed for the weekend, the AQ Chicken House in Bentonville appears to have burned to the ground, Doe's Eat Place was closed -- perhaps not open for lunch -- and we ended up in Abuelo's Mexican Embassy.

Liquor-by-the-wink is alive and well in Benton County. As we entered Abuelo's, we were asked for our membership card. I said we had no intention of ordering alcohol, but in a "dry" county, only private clubs can sell alcohol, and you can't enter a private club without being a member. So we had to fill out a slip of paper (the membership application) at the hostess' station before we were admitted. Many restaurants in the area have message boards with the legend, in very small type, "Attention Members and Guests" -- since a private club would not be advertising to non-members, right?

That's all for now. Light blogging over the next couple of days, as job demands take over. Thanks for your patience.

Ever wonder what it would look like if a cartoon character who wears a Mexican wrestling mask and boxing gloves fell in love with a wagon full of pancakes?

Wonder no more! (Macromedia Flash required.)

...Billy Sims Barbecue Sauce and Selmon Brothers Barbecue Sauce.

But these Sooner greats aren't just to be found in the stores. Heisman Trophy winner Billy Sims has a barbecue place at the Farm Shopping Center now, where the dishes are named after the opponents of the Sooners -- e.g., the beef brisket plate is the Bevo Plate. And Outland Award winner Lee Roy Selmon (youngest brother of Lucious and Dewey) has a couple of theme restaurants in the Tampa area, where he played pro football.

In the course of "researching" this story, I came across this funny Oklahoma retelling of Hansel and Gretel -- "Harold Dean and Grettie Mae." You'll find four more Okie fairy tales linked from this page. They made me laugh so hard my wife figured out I wasn't working and told me to do some chores. Darn it.

Catching up with Insect Blog, based in Stephens County, Oklahoma, which reported back in September that Africanized honeybees ("killer bees") have been confirmed in five counties in Oklahoma: Tillman, Garvin, Pottawatomie, and two others he doesn't name, in southern and western Oklahoma.

He also has photos of extracting honey from one of his hives, and an item about larvae that wear camouflage made of sawdust or other debris. I saw something like this around our house -- looked like a walking clump of lint, about the size of a sunflower seed kernel. From my perspective, it was about a subtle as the cartoon-standard tiptoeing shrubbery, but I'm sure it fooled the little fellow's predators.

Saint Kansas links to photos from last month's "How Berkeley Can You Be? Parade". Berkeley, aka Bezerkely, is home to the main campus of the University of California and is the proud capital of the Left Coast, a place so far out that it makes Cambridge, Mass., look like Altus, Oklahoma.

There are a lot of laughs here for those of us who don't have to live there, but it's obvious that the kids who are involved -- passing out anti-circumcision literature for example -- are pretty weirded out by what their polyamorist parents (two mommies, three daddies) dragged them into.

I really liked the photo of the wild-eyed Commie ranting into her megaphone.

Before I give you the link, be warned that you will find a small amount of nudity, as you might expect in a Berkeley parade. Be assured that you will find it not the least bit arousing.

Here it is.

Does Tulsa have to have parades like this in order to attract The Creative Class?

After the fair Jessica reads what Frank J. has written, will she still heart Halliburton? Frank J. wants to relate some things you may not have known about Halliburton (mainly because they aren't true):

* Halliburton gets its name from the last name of Lucifer Halliburton, prince of darkness.

* The cross Christ was crucified on - all Halliburton. They had sole-source on that for the Romans.

* In Iraq, Halliburton has a couple people instructed to bang a hammer against pieces of wood to pretend they're constructing something while the rest of the employees work on stealing all that sweet, sweet oil.

* Halliburton saves money on labor by using slave labor. They save money on slave drivers by just giving whips to angry gorillas.

Go read it all.

From an episode of "Round the Horne", the classic British comedy radio sketch show from the late '60s

As I got up to leave, he offered me a limp hand.

"Have a limp hand."

"No thanks, I've already got two."

Of today's Bleat, James Lileks says, "I think this will be the stupidest, most geeked-out thing I�ve ever written."

Lileks reminisces about the record bin at Woolworth's, about the soundtrack album for "When Eagles Dare", about Star Trek (the original series):

When that last episode of Star Trek aired you could almost imagine the Enterprise towing the prospect of additional cool sci-fi off into the inky star-flecked void with it. From here on it was Hee Haw and the Jeffersons. But by 1973 Trek was running in syndication, and I watched them all with slavish devotion. I had to leave halfway through every episode, though; had a paper route.

Naturally, I quit the paper route.

Long time Bleat readers are probably thinking Oh fer chrissakes he�s not going to bring up the fargin� �Doomsday Machine,� again? Hello! Rigel to Lileks! Enough! It�s just a TV show! Of course. But now I know why it made such an impression then, and why I enjoy it now. A few months ago a reader emailed me re: a bleat concerning music cues in TV; he said the Trek music cues were actually scored to the individual episodes. I thought that was odd � they seemed to recycle the same cues over and over again. They didn�t write scores for individual episodes, did they?

Well, imagine my surprise. There were a few scores written for specific episodes, and their highlights were recycled over and over. On Amazon I found the soundtrack for �The Doomsday Machine,� and of course I snapped it up. It arrived last Wednesday. To my surprise this score, written for the �Doomsday� episode, is the source of half the series' cues. But they're intended to belong together, and that�s one of the reasons the episode works like few others: it has a unique symphonic score. Played start to finish, it holds together.

Lileks favors us with images from the episode and brief excerpts from the episode's soundtrack and commentary like this:

Sol worked hard on this one, and it burrowed its way into the brains of untold Trek lovers. Put it this way: he�s the reason that several dozen million people subconsciously associate a rising melody on a bassoon with Spock�s arched eyebrow.

Although I left Trekkiehood behind years ago (just after freshman year in high school, if I remember correctly), these orchestral cues clear away for a moment all the things we love to ridicule about the original series -- Bill Shatner's scenery-chewing, the cheesy special effects, those expendable redshirts, and all the other cliches -- to let me recall the magical hold Star Trek had on my young imagination.

Lynn of Reflections in d minor links to the results of a worldwide survey of 1000 linguists, which asked what words (English or otherwise) are the most untranslatable into other languages. Googly, a tricky pitch (sorry, bowl) in cricket, was number five on the list of untranslatable English words.

A word translates easily when the same concept exists in two different cultures. Sometimes a concept described by a word is unusual but not unheard of in the second, and you might be able to translate the word with a short phrase. When you need a whole paragraph (and possibly photographs and diagrams) to explain a word, you've got something truly untranslatable.

An untranslatable word often becomes a borrowed word, when it corresponds to an idea that has yet to receive a name in the second language. The Arabic word altahmam (a kind of deep sadness) and the Portugese word saudade (a type of longing) might come in handy when trying to express shades of emotion, just as that box of 64 crayons lets you draw with more subtlety than the box of 8.

I tried to find out more about selathirupavar, a Tamil word for a sort of truancy, but a Google search instead turned up versions of the article about untranslatable words in dozens of languages.

I wasn't familiar with one word in the top 10 English untranslatables: bumf, which this site says is short for bum-fodder, a term that goes back to the 17th century to refer to printed matter useful only to be hung in the privy for sanitary purposes. Outdated issues of the Sears Roebuck catalog, for example. Fishwrap comes to mind as a near-synonym. Bumf is ripe for borrowing. I see possibilities in the Latin equivalent anitergium for forming derivative words -- e.g., anitergic literature, which should be filling your mailbox as election day draws near, or which appears on your doorstep daily, if you're a Whirled subscriber.

One of the few advantages of doing a weekly guest shot at 6:40 am instead of early evening -- everyone else in the house is asleep and less prone to be the cause of a pre-show crisis, like the one James Lileks had Monday, before his weekly chat with Hugh Hewitt.

Frank J. has more fun facts on offer today:

* It's a myth that Michael Moore never bathes... he just does it nacho cheese sauce.

* John Candy died soon after appearing in Canadian Bacon. It is unknown how many other people Michael Moore's films have killed.

* Though a millionaire, Michael Moore is often stopped on the streets by hobos who offer him hygiene advice.

Cheap shots, yes, but well-deserved.

Lynn at Reflections in d minor calls our attention to a delightful website called Tales of Future Past. If you've been wondering why 21st Century Man isn't whizzing about cloud cities with atomic-powered jetpacks, you need to pay this site a visit.

The site's creator, David Szondy, also has a blog, called The Ephemeral Isle, which some days has a Bleat-like recounting of the days events, sometimes a photo or illustration with a new caption.

Here's a bit from his May 1st entry:

I read an article a while back with the headline �Are Men Obsolete?� I didn�t give it more than a second�s glance. It was the sort of piece that editors run every couple of years in the misguided belief that it�s sensational instead of fatuous. I�ve been reading that sort of thing about men, pubs, PCs, Western civilisation, white men, white Europeans in particular, and the human race in general over the past thirty years and they all have the same tone. Some tidbit of information about parthenogenesis, we-based applications, wine bars, immigration, or even the weather was the turning point that would herald the extinction of the item in question with the writer, in a fit of revealing wishful thinking, implying that no great loss would be involved. Normally, I don�t give any thought to this sort of boilerplate journalism, except that I couldn�t help thinking that the answer to �are men obsolete?� is: �Not as long as women keep moving house.�

Start there and scroll down. Don't miss "Famous Last Moments" or "Religion Moves with the Times".

We are working on the seven-year-old's spring project. At his school, 1st through 4th graders do an individual project each semester, giving them a chance to explore an area of interest in depth and then put together some sort of display to explain it to classmates and parents. Last semester Joseph did the aerodynamics of paper airplanes. This semester, it's toads.

While looking up some info on the web about toads, I found a few interesting items:

Here is an exposé of a three-headed frog story that made the British tabloids this March. The author of the page says it looks like three frogs in amplexus -- a mating ball -- and quotes someone saying that during amplexus frogs and toads secrete mucus to make them stick together better. The same page has a link near the bottom to an amazing little film. Do not follow that link if work somewhere with amphibian employees, as it may tend to create a hostile work environment for them.

Another link on that page leads to this fascinating diary of life in a garden in Aldershot, Hampshire, England. One section of the diary tracks the lifecycle of frogs and newts in the garden pond. There are some astounding photos of frog embryos. And the proprietor of the site is kind enough to tell us how he managed to take those amazing pictures. Elsewhere on the site is a webcam installed in a birdhouse, which has been watching a nest of Great Tits -- the babies are about two weeks old.

or ever had one, you will appreciate this account of the aftermath of a Durham Bulls game from Silflay Hraka:

We then departed, this time to the wails of Ngnat, who felt she had been promised a balloon animal at some point in the evening, and was not shy about letting the world know that she had been damnably cheated.

For two solid blocks she alternately sobbed, then wailed "I-hi wa-hant a-ha ba-loo-hoon an-i-mal-hal!" to the world.

It was her first public tantrum. It was great. I took pictures, though she took to hiding behind her mother in order to prevent me from doing so.

The louder she wailed, the harder it became for SW and I.

Not that we were upset. Far from it. It was all we could do to hide our giggles from her.

Read the whole thing. There's a sweet picture of Ngnat in mid-wail. And the story has a happy ending.

Another story about the lamentable spread of American litigiousness, from the Telegraph:

The arrival of the American-style compensation culture is turning open spaces and public parks into dreary, fun-free, soulless places, the Government's architecture and building advisers said yesterday.

Bouncy castles, ancient trees, boating lakes, adventure playgrounds, public art and even firework displays on windy days, such as the celebrations in Edinburgh last New Year, are all victims of the trend to stop or take down anything that might have the slightest risk attached....

Ruth Holmes, of Groundwork, said: "We can't go for as exciting a playground as we'd like - swings and roundabouts and things like that - because they need to be checked and, if there was a danger, they would have to be closed down.

"We are hoping now to have some static stuff, such as a mound-like fort with a slide and some fixed parallel bars."

A council officer said: "We were worried that children could vandalise the equipment and take bolts out. We are trying to get equipment as tamper-proof as possible. We can't risk somebody being hurt."

The trouble with static equipment is that it is extremely boring to play on, said Cabe, and play areas are now being built where children have no wish to play.

I blogged a while ago about the Toronto School District's removal of all playground equipment for safety reasons, and about the joy of finding "dangerous" old-fashioned equipment still in place and in use in Independence, Kansas.

This move away from fun playground equipment must be a boon to the backyard swingset industry.

We knew spring had arrived, a bit ahead of schedule, back on March 8. The Bradford pear tree in the back yard was about to blossom. It was just a day or so past the full moon, we'd had some big rains, and that night we heard the trilling of a toad next to our backyard pond. The chorus grew and by Saturday we spotted a pair of toads in the pond, um, riding piggyback. This last Monday there were 9 toads in the pond at night, mostly lonely boy toads, pitching noisy woo. On the 17th, we had 17 in the pond, matching last year's peak attendance.

Apparently, our pond received some good word-of-vocal-sac referrals during the off-season. Thursday afternoon there were 22 and by 10 o'clock that night there were 32. It was like a little Woodstock: music, mud, and free love. As it was for the grownups back in '69, it was hard for us outsiders to tell which were the boys and which were the girls, and we had the impression that the toads weren't so sure themselves.

The townies -- the goldfish who are the permanent residents of the pond -- seemed bemused by the noisy, busy tourists in their midst and did their best not to get in the way, but the bigger fish in particular seemed agitated by all the frantic activity.

Thursday night was also when the first strand of little black pearls appeared -- tadpoles-to-be -- and by Friday evening, toad eggs were laced all through the water hyacinths in the middle of the pond.

Friday evening the numbers were down -- back to about 17, mostly singles, having a sing-song round the pool. When they got quiet, my son got them going again with his uncanny and amazing toad call. (Somehow he can trill his tongue and whistle at the same time.) We came across a very tired looking female (we think) resting in the grass nearby. We should start to see the tadpoles hatch in a week or so, and then watch them grow legs, lose their tails, and leave the pond.

(Here's a link about toads in fish ponds and the toad lifecycle.)

Tonight the weather turned cold and the pond is toad-free. And spring is definitely here.

Big Idea, the makers of two hit video kids series -- Veggie Tales and 3-2-1 Penguins -- has a great selection of free arcade games online.

No fees, no registration required, no popups. The games use Java and Shockwave, so you may need to install plugins for your browser.

Although we have a big collection of Veggie Tales videos, I hadn't known about this site until I saw a link on National Review Online's "The Corner" to this game, which involves using a slingshot to launch someone into a spaceship. Planets form obstacles and also exert gravitational influence on the flight path. You can set up some interesting orbits, which make pretty Spirograph-like designs and gain you extra points. There's a new version of the same concept, called "Doom Funnel Chasers", with some more challenging layouts. In this one, you have to fling a ball of duck tape into a sort of black home.

Other favorites include an enhanced version of Breakout, and Jerry's Cheeseburger Madness, which will look familiar to 1980s arcade fans.

It is all kid-friendly and kid-safe, but lots of fun for grownups too. Check it out.

Found this via Lileks: A collection of 365 audio clips, one for every day of 2003. These bits and pieces form no coherent pattern, except that they are all amusing. Here are some examples:

• Paul Harvey speaking to an Amway convention
  
• A college sorority washboard band singing "Love Hurts"
  
• Van Morrison singing about ringworm to discharge a record contract
  
• Pan Am radio spots
  
• Walter Brennan sings "Ruby, Don't Take Your Love to Town"
  
• Mike Wallace explains the tone arm on a Zenith hi-fi
  
• "Merry Christmas, Elvis", a tribute song recorded by a teenage girl about a year after Elvis' death
  

The links above will remain active, but the MP3 files they link to will vanish on January 5, so visit soon. There are ways to get to the MP3s after the 5th, explained on the main page linked above. Because you don't want to miss hearing, one more time after all these years, that '70s public service ad about VD (as we called it the olden days), a tune that will burrow its way into your brain like a T. pallidum bacterium. "Veee Deee... is for ev'reeebuddee!"

James Lileks' Bleat returned from a brief hiatus earlier this week with notes on his family's Christmas observances. From Monday, about his three-year-old's dance recital:

There�s a vast difference between remembering Dad coming to your recital and being Dad at the recital. The first is a memory that dead-ends with you; the latter connects you to him and to all the kids and dads to come.

From Tuesday, the Christmas lights bus tour from hell:

We went up Portland, which had no lights, turned to Chicago, which had fewer. Our host told us that we�d do Minnehaha parkway, which was no doubt blazing with lights, then tour lovely Summit Avenue in St. Paul, where the plutocrats� mansions would no doubt dazzle the eye; then the Lakes in Minneapolis, then home. ...

Summit had some lights, but by then people�s expectations had been raised too high. We wanted to see floodlit spectaculars complete with a dozen elves with perpetually-firing Roman Candles implanted in their buttocks. ...

Nothing so improves a dreary experience like the realization that it will yield a story we can embellish. Give us five years, and the bus will be pulled by donkeys, the temperature in the minus 20s, the liquor nothing more than paint thinner and windshield-wiper fluid.

From Wednesday, a shopping trip to the oddly-quiet Mall of America, and thoughts on '30s, '50s, and '70s nostalgia:

It is every generation�s duty to ridicule the music and fashion of the generations that follow, but I am happy to live in an age when I know my judgments are not colored by creeping codgerism but empirical truth. Today, for example, I saw a kid I went to junior high school with � and by that I mean I saw a note-for-note version of the nightmare styles of 1973. Leather choker. Big mop of curly untamed hair. Burnt-umber T-shirt hanging over baggy jeans. Unkempt and goofy. ...

We�ve had 30 years to study these fashions, and the results are conclusive: they suck. They don�t make anyone look good. They are particularly injurious to someone whose face is dotted with the Vesuvian boils of adolescence. I know it�s a played out meme, but please: we need "80s Eye for the 70s guy. Someone shave these mutts and put �em in Ray-bans and Izod just so they realize there are alternatives to looking like a roadie for the Foghat �Fool For the City� tour.

And today's entry, with a nice early '60s view of Southdale, the First Shopping Mall, decked out for Christmas, links to a couple of worthy charities, and outtakes from the Christmas card photo shoot. The final page has the final version of the card -- very cute -- and an intriguing link about which more in the next entry.

I was in western New York on business for a couple of days last week, and drove past a sign for this establishment. It's interesting how your brain parses words:

Puzzled by pork-pies? Baffled by berets? Wondering how to measure your head? All is answered at hats-online.com. If you can't remember the difference between a homburg and a derby, or are looking to buy a top hat or a newsboy's cap, this site looks like a good resource. No idea if this is a good place to buy from, but it's an interesting browse anyway.

A bit of Internet serendipity:

The news reached me that longtime BBC weatherman Michael Fish was being put out to pasture for the sin of being almost 60 and not at all telegenic. I remember watching his nightly forecasts during business trips to the UK.

The article was an op-ed piece by Conservative MP Boris Johnson, who referred to Fish's "sex maniac's moustache".

It may have been his permanently bashful air. It may have been his sex maniac's moustache. Perhaps it was something to do with the way he goggled at the camera in the manner of a rattled maths master asked at the last minute to give out the prizes. It may have been the colossal Britishness of Fish, not just evinced by his constant talk of weather, but his faint air of apology for the frost and the drizzle and the general damp. It may have been the unremitting politeness with which he broke the bad news about tomorrow's downpour, like a man in the Tube, reluctantly tugging your sleeve to announce that you are treading on his toe.

The piece goes on to present some interesting stats on weather forecasting -- you would attain a 76% accuracy rating if you always predicted that tomorrow will be just like today. (That may be true in England. I doubt it's true in Oklahoma.)

I only vaguely remembered what Michael Fish looked like, and couldn't imagine what kind of mustache fit that description (Daliesque? Fu Manchu? Toothbrush?), so I googled his name and found a photo here, along with a bio. (That link no longer works, but here is a gallery on Michael Fish's own website, showing the evolution of his facial hair over the decades.) Further googling led me to the lyrics to a song by Rowan Atkinson in praise of Mr. Fish.

[Rowan] Atkinson: Michael Fish, quite simply the most charismatic figure in the history... of entertainment.

[Angus] Deayton and Singers: He tells it straight... to the nation... every night... he's an inspiration... He tells the truth...

Atkinson: He does, he tells it to you, he tells it to you.

Deayton and Singers: Monday to Friday...

Atkinson: Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday and sometimes Saturday and Sunday.

Deayton and Singers: His moustache... is always tidy...

The site with the lyrics looked interesting -- a tribute to something called "Chart of the Flops", which appears to have been a radio program similar to Dr. Demento. Here is the list of songs that made the chart in its 10 year history, with lyrics for many of them. Included are Dr. Demento standards and classic American novelty tunes like "Fish Heads", "Monster Mash", "Hello Mudduh", "Der Fuehrer's Face", several selections each from Weird Al, They Might Be Giants, and Tom Lehrer, along with their counterparts from across the pond -- Monty Python, Peter Sellers, the Goons, the Goodies.

One of the songs on the list was "The Highway Code" by the Master Singers, which is apparently the British rules of the road set to music. I have not hear that, but years ago I heard another one of their songs on Dr. Demento -- "Weather Report", which was a weather forecast set in Anglican chant and sung to perfection. (It may not sound much to you, but it had me laughing.) I googled the Master Singers and found this blog entry, which contained a link to an MP3 file of "Weather Report".

Both "Highway Code" and "Weather Report" hit the British charts in 1966. The songs were produced by George Martin, who also was producer for the Beatles. One website (which has a good description of Anglican chant) says that the Master Singers later became the King's Singers (who have a new Christmas album), but I see nothing on the King's Singers website mentioning that, although the group unofficially began at Cambridge a year before the two singles reached the charts. But this page says the group consisted of four teachers from Abingdon School, and that they backed Peter Sellers on a cover of the Beatles' "Help!"

I had googled this before, but had always come up empty in the past. Which brings us back to the weather and Michael Fish, which is what started me down this path.

Go and have a listen to the weather report.

UPDATE: You can hear the current shipping forecast -- one is included in the Master Singers' version -- at the BBC weather website, which has a map explaining what Forties Cromarty Dogger Fisher German Bight means. Link courtesy Two Chaps Talking, who say: "Listening to the Shipping News on a short wave radio, or indeed via their website, is a rare delight and should be enjoyed regularly for its calming effect."

UPDATE again: Fixed a link above, which was to a blog category rather than the permanent link to the blog entry. Also, someone reported to me he clicked on the link for the MP3 file and was greeted with a very rude ad about body part enlargement. I double-checked and nothing like that happened to me -- I suspect the computer he's using has some spyware on it, or else the previous site he visited "respawned" and popped up a window as he left it. Anyway, please know that I will not deliberately link you to something rude, so if something like this happens to you, please e-mail me at blog at batesline dot com and let me know.

Yet another UPDATE: A thoughtful reader from the UK has sent a link to an MP3 of "The Highway Code" by the Master Singers. Be aware that these files may disappear at any time, and be considerate of the bandwidth of those who are hosting them. Another reader, with an e-mail address from the Royal College of Music, writes:

Actually, two of the Master Singers (including Geoffrey Keating) were teachers at Cheadle Hulme School, Cheshire. They were there by 1965. Geoffrey Keating moved on to Millfield in 1970. They may all have been at Abingdon before 1965, I suppose. Members of the Master Singers and the King Singers were friends (a Cambridge connection probably), and the Kings Singers came to sing at Cheadle Hulme, but I don't think that there was any overlap in membership. The Master Singers were a few years older than the first Kings Singers, as I recall.

One more UPDATE (1 October 2004): A reader points out, correctly, that this isn't plainsong at all, it's Anglican chant, which is harmonized, while plainsong is unison.

Another UPDATE (26 September 2006): On the anglican-music mailing list earlier this year, John Botari believes he has identified the three chants used for "Weather Forecast":

I once took the trouble to figure out which chants were used for The Weather Forecast; there are three of them (sung A-B-C-B-A).

Here's what I came up with:

A - George Mursell Garrett (1834-97)
The only place that I could find this one was
at #268 in the ECUSA Anglican Chant Psalter,
in Ab. (Certainly *not* where the Mastersingers
found it!)

B - W. Taylor
Found (in Db) at #232 in The Parish Psalter
with Chants (ed. Sydney Hugo Nicholson), or
(in D) at #129 and #335 in the Oxford Chant
Book No. 1.

c - Stephen Elvey (1805-60)
Found (in G) at #116 in The Parish Psalter,
or (in F) at #9 and #342 in the ECUSA Anglican
Chant Psalter.

Yet another UPDATE (7 May 2007): Helen Keating, wife of Geoff Keating, one of the Mastersingers (using her spelling), has written me with the definitive account of the Mastersingers, the Highway Code, and the Weather Report.

Every semester, grade school students at Regent Preparatory School do a semester project. Students pick a subject that interests them, do some sort of activity related to that interest, and then put together a visual presentation about what they did.

Joseph is doing his first project this year, and he chose paper airplanes for his topic. When I was in Savannah, I found a great book called Amazing Paper Planes, by Edward Hui, and brought it home as a gift for Joe. A couple of weekends ago we built and tested most of the patterns in the book, all of which can be made from a single sheet of paper, and most of which require no cutting or taping. The book includes explanations of the aerodynamics of paper planes, and, crucially, how to diagnose problems with a plane's flight and make appropriate adjustments.

The star performer was the paperang, a craft that looks more like a hang glider than a traditional paper dart. Released (not thrown) from about 6 feet, the plane swoops down then glides along inches above the floor before coming to a landing. It can do some fancy flying when launched like a boomerang.

The author now has a website devoted to the paperang design, where you can view instructions and construction photos. For a fee you can download a printable version. All you need is a sheet of paper, a pair of scissors, and a stapler -- one staple in the middle to hold it together.

UPDATE 1/3/2006: Corrected author's name.

A reader writes:

I have heard more than one person comment that it is not surprising that Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein have not been found, considering the difficulty Oklahoma law enforcement has had in finding suspected killer Scott Eizember in Bristow. It occurred to me that the difficulty capturing Eizember not surprising when one recalls that it once took an entire summer to capture an escaped elephant in Oklahoma.

Does anyone else remember this? To the best of my recollection, it was the summer of 1977, or thereabouts. I don't remember if the elephant escaped from a traveling circus, or from the one that used to winter near Hugo. I do remember a summer of scattered elephant sightings. At one point the elephant was actually surrounded, then managed to escape and disappear again.

Anyone else recall this?

Thoughtful, humorous, nostalgic, ironic -- lileks.com is one of my favorite places on the web.

Some Lileks highlights I meant to link to last week:

On Monday, a tribute to Chernobog, the demonic figure in the "Night on Bare Mountain" sequence of "Fantasia". The links at the end about Chernobog's animator are interesting to follow, as is Lileks' explanation why "Night on Bare Mountain" is a more appealing piece of music than "Rite of Spring", another piece featured in the original "Fantasia":

Had lunch at Kim Long's today and as we were driving away I noticed a newly opened Internet cafe on the north side of 81st, east of Memorial, advertising free wireless Internet access. It's called Caffe Bona. I didn't stop in today, but will be interested to check it out at some point. It's hard to imagine an Internet coffee shop working as a place you reach by car -- perhaps they'll draw clientele from the apartment complex within walking distance.

With a name like Caffe Bona, I'm guessing the place is run by Julian and his friend Sandy, filling in between acting engagements.

(I'd be interested in knowing how many Tulsa readers have any idea what that last paragraph is all about.)

UPDATE: Since no one e-mailed to say, "I get it! Ha, ha!", I'll explain myself in the extended entry below.

Despite the wonder about a wireless internet cafe in a suburban context, I am thrilled that someone is opening such an establishment in Tulsa, and I wish them all the best. I really enjoyed the Internet cafe I frequented in Savannah, and I hope the idea spreads quickly to Midtown and Downtown.

Let's not give the Tulsa County Commission any ideas. ...

(Hat tip to Moxie.)

Paul Greenberg is one of my favorite columnists. He writes beautifully, picturesquely, about politics, culture, international affairs, and faith. He won a Pulitzer Prize in 1969 for editorial writing. A native of Shreveport, he spent 27 years as editorial writer for the Pine Bluff Commercial, and has been editorial page editor of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette since 1992. His columns on Southern culture are worth reading and rereading.

Nearly every year, he recycles a couple of favorite summertime columns. One is on the joys of fresh Bradley County Pink tomatoes:

No words can capture the experience itself. The annual ritual in June becomes habit by July. To recapture the thrill, take one Bradley County Pink. Note the vivid color, the simple heft, the way it was made for the human hand. Do not delay, but do not hurry, either. Pause to appreciate the ripeness slowly achieved over the past few days. Don't forget to enjoy the scent -- with eyes closed. Breathe deeply. Then slice evenly, noting the fine texture. Be careful of the juice. No, don't taste yet. Barely sprinkle with just a little coarse salt, then make a tomato sandwich using two slices of brown bread and very little, just the lightest little hint, of unsalted butter, nothing more. Now. And you know what time itself tastes like.

The second classic is his annual list of 50 ways to cool off in the dog days of summer:

9. Take siestas; arrange to live in the early morning and after twilight.

10. Don't hurry back, or anywhere else. If you must hurry, do it slowly.

20. Have a tall cold one. With a hot dog. At a minor league ballpark. Luxuriate in the nostalgia. My recommendation: Ray Winder Field in Little Rock, Ark.

31. Walk on the shady side of the street, of course. (Visitors from Up No'th have to be reminded.) Also park there. Whoever designed the treeless parking lots around shopping malls should have to park in one every day in August. Let the punishment fit the crime.

Go and savor it all. And while you're at it, sample the rest of his insights.

Came across a fascinating website. An American computer professional and his wife retired to the town of Corozal in northern Belize. The website provides a wonderfully rich description of life there. It covers the practical and financial details of their life.

There is also a full page of diner food recipes, and a technique for taking cold showers.

Someone sent me this -- a Bob and Ray bit with Ray as Hubert C. Waxford, chairman of the "Far Sighted Planners for Urban Renewal":

Bob: I understand you put forth a number of new theories on urban renewal from your office in Washington.

Waxford: I did have an office in Washington, but it was torn down on the recommendation of another urban renewal planner.

Bob: Well, in any event....

Waxford: I'll get him for that, too, if it's the last thing I ever do. Yeah, he turned my office into a parking lot for his office....

Later, Waxford demonstrates more far-sighted urban renewal ideas:

Waxford: Now for instance, I recently calculated that Tucson, Arizona, could become a city of one million if it had a good harbor on the Pacific Ocean. But we'd have to tear down San Diego and replace it with Tucson to do that. However, I'm hoping that some of the people who had to move away when we tore all the buildings down may eventually come back. If they do, they'll find that it's much better planned than it used to be.

Bob: Well, I'm sure that's true, and you've given us all a better understanding of how you improve communities by destroying them, Mr. Waxford....

They really nail the urban renewal ethos. You can hear it on Bob and Ray: The Lost Episodes, Volume Three.

I first saw this silly animation last fall, when Jonah Goldberg linked to it in NRO's The Corner. It's no longer (for some reason) on its original site, rathergood.com, but this brilliant piece, wherein Luciano Pavarotti declares his appreciation for pachyderms, is still there and worth a look. (You will need Macromedia Flash installed to view the files.) Likewise you might want to see the Gerbiloons dancing to "Shiny, Happy People", and some fun with misheard Beatle lyrics.

A cautionary note: While everything on rathergood.com is strange, some of it is also rather crude, so you may not want to browse the site randomly. The selections I've linked, however, are offensive only to those who object to marauding Danish felines singing Led Zep and breeding giant rodents for use as airships. And the Pavarotti thing really is a must-see for you opera buffs. (And yes, that's really him singing and those are really the words he's singing. Or at least what they sound like in English.)

From the MIT Class of 1987 class news. (Thanks again to Dave Russ.)

Carrie and Ryan Fong* thought that many like-minded MIT classmates might
get a kick out of the following story pertaining to a number of contests
they entered late last year. I know I did:

76 (gas stations) had a promotion for customers to try to guess the number
of 76 antenna balls that would fit into a Chevy Trailblazer. The contest ran
for 8 weeks with the person with the closest guess (without going over) in
each of the 8 weeks winning a new Trailblazer. I didn't find out about the
contest until it was well into the 3rd week. The primary rules of the
contest were that you could enter as many times as you would like, but that
only one winner per household would be allowed. Each entry had to be on an
official form obtainable only from 76 stations, and filled out by hand. The
winner each week was not announced until all 8 weeks had passed (that would
be too easy if they didn't have that rule).

I rented out a Chevy Trailblazer and filled it with packing peanuts to help
determine the interior volume. Using a little math & science related to
sphere packing densities, I estimated the number of antenna balls that might
fit into the space. While there is math for sphere packing in an ordered
manner, and even experimental results for random packing of spheres, there
are factors unique to this contest that had to be considered, including how
the spheres contact the irregularly-shaped container (vehicle walls), as
well as the effects of surface friction and mass of the antenna balls. After
making some educated guesses about the ranges of variation that were
probable, I came up with a distribution of guesses.

Meanwhile, I gathered up in excess of 6,000 entry blanks from 76 stations
throughout the area (picture a stack of entry blanks almost 3 feet tall),
and with the assistance of friends and family (none living in the same
household), proceeded to complete and submit the entries We submitted
approximately 1200 entries a week for the final 5 weeks of the contest, with
slight shifts in the guess distribution to more thoroughly cover the guess
range.

Because of the relatively tight range of my required guess distribution, we
actually hit most numbers very close to the central guess twice. In deciding
how to distribute the guesses, I had to decide how confident I was of my
calculations (tighten the distribution), and whether I wanted to maximize my
chances of winning at least one vehicle (spread out the distribution), or of
winning multiple vehicle (tighten the distribution). Well, I'm happy to say
that we won 4 out of the last 5 Trailblazers - we had the correct number
one week and were low by 1, 2 & 4 on the other weeks that we won. The week
we lost, we were actually low by 5 antenna balls. I was bummed to have
missed my clean sweep, but I spoke with a couple of other MIT classmates and
discovered that the same contest was going on in another state. I was able
to provide one classmate with my guess distributions in time for him to win
the last Trailblazer in his region!

The "Tick Tock Toys" section of "The Imaginary World" has images from a 1970s catalog of playground equipment. The cover image is of the "Space Cruiser", which bears a slight resemblance to the original USS Enterprise. They had one of these in the park near my cousins' house in Midwest City; as a trekkie of 9 or 10, I thought it was very cool. Last time I was by there, a couple of years ago, it was still in use.

The "Tick Tock Toys" page is full of commercial baby boomer nostalgia. There are images of food you begged your parents to buy (like Space Food Sticks), very un-PCdrink mixes, and much more. Go have a rummage through the images of our collective past.

Hans Kistner sends along links to a 2-minute Honda ad, which uses the parts of a Honda Accord in a sort of Rube Goldberg / "Mouse Trap" arrangement, a chain of reactions that begins with movement of a single part. It took over 600 takes to get this to work perfectly -- no trick photography or special effects.. The Daily Telegraph tells how the commercial was made.

The bigshots at Honda's world headquarters in Japan, when shown Cog for the first time, replied that yes, it was very clever, and how impressive trick photography was these days. When told that it was all real, they were astonished.

One of the more striking moments in the film is when a lone windscreen wiper blade helicopters through the air, suspended from a line of metal twine. "That was the first and last time it worked properly," recalls Tony Davidson, of the London-based advertising agency Wieden & Kennedy. "I wanted it to look like ballet."

After that, a few yards and several ingenious connections down the assembly line, another pair of windscreen wiper blades is squirted by an activated washer jet. Because Honda wipers have automatic sensors that can detect water, they start a crablike crawl across the floor. It is as though they have come to life.

Go see it. It is very cool.

A web search for photos of old-time playground equipment (of the sort they have at Riverside Park in Independence, Kansas) turned up this little essay by Bill Van Dyk about a decision to tear down every playground in the Toronto school district despite the fact that the old equipment was safe:

What happened was this. An inspector from Ottawa had created a report that laid out some guidelines for new playground equipment, with the laudable goal of ensuring that they would be as safe as possible. The new guidelines were better than the old guidelines, of course. Some clever people have found ways to build playground equipment that is safer than ever before.

The Toronto School Board, having received their new guidelines, hired an inspector from a private service to check all of their playground equipment to see if they conformed with the new guidelines. They did not, of course. The old playground equipment is, well, old.

As it turns out, the old playground equipment was not very bad at all. Out of the hundreds of thousands of children who had played on them, no one had ever been killed, nor, apparently, were there many serious injuries. In fact, more children are injured on the paved areas of the playground and the yard than on the playground equipment.

Still, no cost is too high when it comes to children's safety. Except for the cost of common sense and rationality. The Toronto School Board ordered 172 sets of old playground equipment removed, on the off chance that someone, some day, might get hurt really bad.

Just back from a weekend trip to Lawrence, Kansas, to see my cousin graduate from high school. We made some stops on the way there and back to give Dad a break and let the kids run around.

On the way home tonight, we stopped for nearly two hours at Riverside Park in Independence, Kansas. Independence is a little city of about 10,000, county seat of Montgomery County. Like most Kansas county seats, it is a beautiful town, with tree-lined streets of tidy Late Victorian and Craftsman homes, a stately courthouse, and a downtown of beautifully restored commercial buildings which appear to be fully occupied.

Riverside Park sits on the north side of town, 124 acres above the banks of the Caney River, and features a small zoo, two playgrounds, an antique carousel, a lighted fountain, miniature golf, a miniature train ride, and tennis courts.

Our first stop on entering the park was the big playground near the Carousel. This is where Joe (nearly 7) wanted to spend his time. Visiting the playground is like traveling through time, starting with big metal behemoths probably built in the '50s, through '60s fiberglass bouncy horses, earth-toned climbing equipment from the '70s, up through a plastic play complex from the late '90s.

The behemoths to which I refer are old but very well maintained pieces of equipment which were designed with the assumption of a level of acceptable risk in child play which exceeds that of our safety-conscious age:

• A 12 foot high platform, providing access to five slides -- two straight and flat, two straight but wavy, and a curly slide -- reached by two steep metal ladders. The platform has a "guard rail" about 18 inches high, just high enough to catch a grownup's feet as he falls off and ensure that he hits the ground head first. The steps of these ladders are wrought iron manifestations of the the words "FUN FUL", which I take to be the manufacturer's name. I only found one reference to such a company on the web, a photo of a merry-go-round ride called an "Ocean Wave", circa 1920. I remember something very much like that in the playground in front of Catoosa Elementary School, and I think I saw one in Seiling Park in Broken Arrow within the last 10 years (no longer there).
• A twelve-foot high "fire tower" featuring a big hole in the floor (for a fire pole) as well as a straight slide.
• A six-foot slide platform with metal sheets extending down either side -- the kind that will fry you like bacon on a hot summer day.
• An antique ladder truck. A real one. Not something wooden and small with rubber bumpers over the sharp edges, not a relic fenced in and out of reach, but a real old fire truck that kids can climb all over. The steering wheel actually turns the wheels, which have real (mostly flat) tires. You can climb all the way back on the ladder. Sadly, the controls to raise, extend, and swivel the ladder have been disabled, probably by order of some safety-obsessed killjoys.
• A spinning circle -- the kind with the raised elongated bumps at right angles for traction, and bars radiating and rising from the center, then forking out and connecting to the edge. Joe was riding it, having me spin him faster and faster. As he was spinning, and as I was pondering whether, out of appreciation for the City of Independence having the guts to keep this classic play equipment available, I would refrain from filing suit if one of my kids were injured -- as if he could read my mind, Joe launched himself off the circle. His foot was caught by one of the handholds and it seemed he might be dragged around, but the circle stopped quickly. Joe was fine, grinning. He got up, brushed off the sand (that's what they use around all the play equipment -- not hard, splintery wood chips, but nice soft sand). "I intended to do that. I thought it would be cool to jump off!"
• Big heavy seesaws, the kind that will perform reverse traction on your spine if your partner suddenly scrams.

Katherine (nearly 3) was not all that interested in the playground. She wanted to ride the carousel with Mommy. And she did, probably about 15 times. When it's only a nickel a ride, you can ride 15 times. The carousel is beautifully restored, protected from the elements by a recently constructed canopy.

The train wasn't running -- it's only 25 cents -- and we didn't take time for the mini-golf course which illustrates the history of Independence (only $1 a game). We did stock up on sodas from the vending machines for the ride home -- only 50 cents a can.

The extra carousel rides and time on the playground was in lieu of a stroll through the park's Ralph Mitchell Zoo. The zoo mainly features small animals, and the centerpiece is a WPA-built monkey island, which was once home to astro-monkey Miss Abel. As recently as our last visit, three years ago, the zoo was just part of the park, accessible whenever the park was open. Now there was a tall wire fence surrounding the zoo, and they close the zoo at 8 p.m. My wife asked the lady at the carousel ticket booth what had changed. She said federal zoo regulators required the fence and the 24-hour presence of a zookeeper.

As we loaded up the car for the trip home we could hear the wild cries of the peafowl which roam the zoo grounds.

First baby toad of the season! The toads return to our backyard goldfish pond every year near the vernal equinox with a raucous party by the light of the full moon. Within a few days, strings of toad eggs decorate the water, and shortly thereafter, thousands of tadpoles.

It's two months later, almost a full moon, and tonight we caught this little fella. I would tell you whether it's a boy or a girl, but such activity was prohibited by my alma mater.

Meanwhile, the grown-up toads (at least 11 by Mikki's count) are having another noisy full moon party, uninhibited by MIT regulations. More cute babies will be on their way soon, it seems....

Joe reminded me of another cute baby picture I intended to post. We saw this armored little bundle of joy near his T-ball field, scuttling off the road into the tallgrass. Couldn't be more than five or six inches long, excluding the tail.

Happy Fun Pundit also weighs on on Bill Bennett's gambling habit, with some thoughtful entries in the comments section. Some other time, I'll tell you about my views on gambling. For now, I just want to say how appalled I am at Bennett's choice of games -- video poker and slots. I had higher expectations of the man; thought he'd at least play a table game like blackjack where there is some skill involved and a way of narrowing the odds. And if he did just want to turn his mind off and push buttons, wouldn't the nickel slots work as well for that purpose as the $500-a-pull variety?

Some of the comments on Happy Fun Pundit's post suggest he did it for the complementary perqs given to high rollers -- free rooms, food, booze, limos, show tickets. My last year in college, in 1985, I went with several fraternity brothers to visit the parents of one of them, who were playing blackjack in Atlantic City. They had complimentary rooms at several casinos, had complimentary meals. They put us up in one of their complimentary rooms in the Trump Tower, and one of the guys ordered Dom Perignon via room service -- all included in the complimentary service. My fraternity brother's parents gambled enough at blackjack to qualify for all these goodies, but because they knew basic strategy, how to pace your bets, and possibly a little card counting, they never lost much, and usually came out slightly ahead, enough to pay for the airfare, and they got to live like kings for a couple of days.

Speaking of "High Rollers" -- remember that craps-based quiz show? It's what Alex Trebek did before Jeopardy, with Ruta Lee as his dice girl. Also in the '70s you had game shows based on blackjack (Gambit, with Wink Martindale), slot machines (Joker's Wild, with Jack Barry), and roulette-like games (Press Your Luck, Wheel of Fortune).

Sorry. I was going to say something about the "Book of Virtues", but I drifted a bit. Anyway, here's a page with memories of the 1974 game show line-up, including a photo of a very mod Alex Trebek. The author of the page recounts happy memories watching game shows with his grandmother during summer vacation -- me, too. My summer schedule was built around the game shows, and you could pretty much spend all day watching them -- every network had them, and they ran all day long. At Grandma's house, game shows were supplanted only by Cubs baseball or Star Trek.

I hereby change this entry's category from "Culture" to "Whimsy".

Happy Fun Pundit says the Enterprise needs some fuses, WD-40, and seatbelts. And fabric more flattering than spandex.

The Wall Street Journal's Michael Judge offers an appreciation of the life-work of Charlie Douglass, inventor of the "Laff-Box":

"Sometimes called the Laugh Organ, the first Laff Box stood just over two feet tall and was operated something like an organ. Different buttons could be pressed to combine different types of laughter--belly laughs or chuckles, hoots or guffaws--and the operator could even choose the sex and age (man, women or child) of the laughter. Foot pedals were used to control the timing and duration of the laughter."

Judge says the Laff Box serves a useful social purpose and won't be going away anytime soon.