March 2008 Archives
Tulsa Now Forum: Are there any "soul food" restaurants in tulsa?
"Cornbread and turnip greens, hamhocks and butter beans, Mardi Gras down in New Orleans -- that's what I like about the South." This forum thread includes a lengthy and mouthwatering list of foods that qualify as soul food.
Fold-Ins, Past and Present - The New York Times
From the inside back cover of MAD magazine, a collection of Al Jaffee's best fold-ins, covering his long career and a wide range of topics. (Via Mister Snitch!)
The New York Sun: Attorney General Gets Emotional In Calling for Surveillance Power
Attorney General Mukasey puts my mind at ease: "So far as focusing investigations, we investigate where the threat is coming from. The threat is coming from Islamist extremism. It's not coming from Calvinism. We'd be out of our minds not to mention the waste of resources to look everyplace simply in the name of being correct." (Via Founders Blog.)
Candidate, Improve Your Appearance! - Dick Cavett - Opinion - New York Times Blog
Look past some of the political nonsense and you'll find some useful speechifying tips here.
The Low B---s--- Guide to St. Louis
Despite the crude name, J. Brad Hicks' 1997 description of St. Louis, its sights, culture, cuisine, and politics was fascinating reading. It was a site I bookmarked in my early websurfing days. No longer updated, but archived by the Wayback Machine.
Ephemeral Isle: Vanguard: World's Oldest Spacecraft
Sure, the Commies had Sputnik up first, but ours has stayed up the longest -- half a century.
TPMCafe | Talking Points Memo | Fallacy #1: The Founders Weren't Deists
First in a series about the faith of the Founding Fathers. Washington, Adams, Jefferson, and Franklin may not have been orthodox, but they "believed in an omnipotent god who intervened in the lives of men and nations" and "that their actions in life would be judged and determine their fate in the afterlife." And many other members of the Constitutional Convention -- Patrick Henry, Sam Adams, John Hancock, John Witherspoon among them -- were orthodox Christians. (Via Rod Dreher.)
Museum pieces are sure to be well read - Los Angeles Times
The American Sign Museum in Cincinnati features rescued neon from across the country: "Visitors entering the garden are drawn to a spinning Sputnik replica that welcomed customers in the 1960s to the Satellite Shopland shopping center in Anaheim. The 6-foot-diameter plastic globe -- its metal spikes studded with colored light bulbs -- spins near a Dutch Boys Donuts windmill with rotating blue neon blades from 1950s Denver." (Hat tip to Richard Hedgecock.)
IndieLondon: Obituary: Brian Wilde
Wilde, who died last week at age 80, was on one of my favorite British sitcoms, Last of the Summer Wine. (It's not the usual zany madcap humor or a sharp irony you might associate with British comedy.
It's gentler humor -- imagine the characters in the comic strip Pogo transplanted from the Okefenokee Swamp to the hills of Yorkshire.) Wilde played ex-Army Cpl. Foggy Dewhurst, the third in a trio of retirees who wondered about the villages and countryside getting into mischief. Wilde was one of a series of bossy know-it-alls (a series that began with Michael Bates -- the one who played Montogmery in Patton) alongside Bill Owen as scruffy Compo and Peter Sallis as meek Norman Clegg.
Mister Snitch!: Plain talk on "two candidates that love america"
A great piece of political analysis which aims to answer the questions, "Why is Hillary still in the race?" And, "What is Bill Clinton up to?"
Clueless Guys Can't Read Women - Yahoo! News
To a guy, flirtation looks like friendliness and vice versa. This is news? (Via Ace.)
By Ken Levine: Open letter to airlines: we hate you
Communicating honestly with passengers about flight delays -- the problem isn't weather in Chicago; the pilot is waiting in a long line at Starbucks -- would go a long way to winning back public confidence. (Some vulgar expressions. Via Ace.)
Hundreds of 'em. (Via Club for Growth.)
Mister Snitch!: The final Calvin & Hobbes strip?
"Not the genuine article, but a poignant idea." Sad in a way that speaks volumes about childhood, imagination, and overmedication.
compfight / a flickrâ„¢ search tool
Uses the flickr API to find photos relevant to a topic, and you can filter for images that are under Creative Commons and available for reuse. (Via Mister Snitch!)
Dwelling in Possibilities - ChronicleReview.com
"For his student generation is a singular one, at least in my experience of 30 or so years teaching: Its members have a spectacular hunger for life and more life. They want to study, travel, make friends, make more friends, read everything (superfast), take in all the movies, listen to every hot band, keep up with everyone they've ever known. And there's something else, too, that distinguishes them: They live to multiply possibilities. They're enemies of closure. For as much as they want to do and actually manage to do, they always strive to keep their options open, never to shut possibilities down before they have to." (Via World on the Web.)
ToddSeavey.com: The Violated and the Dead
On the destruction wrought by eminent domain: "The worst sort of property rights violations are the ones that destroy old, complex, organic social relationships, the way Robert Moses' demolition of New York neighborhoods did -- famously, nearly including [Greenwich] Village."
Abortionist Caught on Tape | Students For Life
Why is baby killer George Tiller speaking at the National Education Association? "Students for Life of America (SFLA) today released video exposing footage of abortionist Dr. George Tiller of Wichita, KS openly discussing children who 'slip out' accidentally during an abortion and are 'born alive' or with a 'heartbeat'.... Dr. Tiller, who currently faces 19 criminal charges for illegal late-term abortions in the state of Kansas, stated 'If the baby is born alive, that is sloppy medicine.'..." (Via La Shawn Barber.)
Mikhail Gorbachev admits he is a Christian - Telegraph
As a kid, I always wondered what might happen if a Christian could secretly work his way up through the Soviet hierarchy. I guess we found out. "It was through St Francis that I arrived at the Church, so it was important that I came to visit his tomb.... I feel very emotional to be here at such an important place not only for the Catholic faith, but for all humanity." (Via Peter Robinson at The Corner, who notes that Reagan suspected that Gorbachev was a secret believer.)
The classic short story by Arthur C. Clarke, who passed away this week at the age of 90.
RealClearPolitics - HorseRaceBlog - On Obama's Speech
"Candidates make all kinds of promises about what they will do, and voters need to find some way to gauge whether they will actually do what they say. One way to do that is to look at what they have done. By contextualizing Jeremiah Wright in the broader dilemma of American divisiveness, Obama has identified his experience at Trinity as a small instance of a larger problem that plagues the country, the problem to which he intends to dedicate the 44th presidency. It is therefore reasonable to ask what he did - empowered as he was as a high-profile, long-standing parishioner - to change the viewpoint of Wright or Trinity, and whether those efforts were successful. The essential problem of the speech is that it gives no answer to these queries." RELATED: Ed Morrissey writes, "How responsible or courageous is it to remain silent in that community while the rhetoric that Obama finds so objectionable gets delivered to the next two generations -- including his own children?"
Crunchy Con: You wanna feel old?
That Late Eighties Show? "A new sitcom starting this fall depicting a year as far removed from today as Happy Days was from 1974 would have to begin its drama in ... 1989."
TechCrunch: Charlie Rose Face Plants To Save His MacBook Air
PBS interviewer Charlie Rose bleeds for his Mac. "Rose tripped in a pothole.... He was carrying a newly purchased MacBook Air and made a quick (but ultimately flawed) decision while falling: sacrifice the face, protect the computer." (Via Mister Snitch!)
Tulsa Now Forum - My WinStar Casino Project
Tulsa artist William Franklin presents photos of his work-in-progress for the Chickasaw Nation's WinStar Casino -- murals for 30' and 50' domes in five themed areas -- Paris, Beijing, Rome, London and Madrid. Beautiful.
World On the Web: Artless Christianity
"[B]ad Christian art cripples our compassionate imagination. When the bad guys practically have signs in a novel or movie labeling them as such, and the soon-to-be saved characters are similarly cordoned off, we lose sight of the wickedness that inhabits saints, and the despair that inhabits the hearts of the lost."
Look At This...: The 8 Most Ridiculous Dance Crazes
... and many other odd lists, including 5 Works of Art That Can Probably Kill You and The 8 Worst Possible SkyMall Impulse Purchases. Via Violins and Starships.
Go Ironmen! - a photoset on Flickr
Erin Lady Byrne presents color scans of the yearbook photos (with inscriptions!) for the Nowata, Oklahoma, high school classes of 1979, 1980, 1981, and 1982. (Her parents taught there during that time period.)
Eliot Spitzer's Princeton '80 classmates remember him when: "I think you'll recall that he was the typical student government jackass, power-hungry in his little tiny area of influence, always scheming, a real pr**k....
Even then he had scary-dead eyes, like a damn shark. He struck me as a ruthless SOB at the time, and I didn't have much to do with him if I could avoid it." Another commenter responds to the question, "Who needs sex this badly?": "The same sort of personality that desperately needs to hold high office?"
dwayne.blog-city.com: A week of Tulsa neon
Dwayne (aka Mike Horshead) was in Tulsa last weekend (and he didn't even call!). He spent the day photographing neon signs (during the day) and other interesting sites, like Thelma's Bar and Bill's Jumbo Burgers on Admiral west of Lewis, the Blue Whale in Catoosa and the Warehouse (Public) Market downtown. Start on this entry and keep hitting the >> symbol to view the next entry in sequence. There are some perspectives you won't have seen before.
Hot Air: Great: Mark Pryor to run unopposed for Senate after Republicans fail to field challenger
A state that voted twice for George W. Bush, and yet no Republican could be bothered to challenge the incumbent Democratic senator or any of the three Democratic congressmen. The one Republican incumbent congressman didn't draw a major party opponent either. Is the bar to filing for office that high in Arkansas?
XSPF Web Music Player (Flash) - Plays MP3 on your website
At long last! An open-source embedded audio player. Will it work? You may find out later tonight.
If Celebs Moved to Oklahoma | Wintrest.com
Someone's photoshopped Hollywood faces on to Hulbert bodies! What would Britney, Paris, Sarah Jessica, Cameron, and Travolta look like if they were deprived of their hairstylists, designer fashions, and personal trainers? (Michael Douglas looks an awful lot like an evangelist who preached our spring revival one year. And am I wrong to think the Olson twins look better with a little meat on their bones?)
Tom McMahon distills riddles, people, events, and home truths into pithy, often laugh-out-loud funny, four-block diagrams
TreoFaq: Ringtones and the Treo
How to convert an audio file into a custom ringtone for a Treo 650. (It really works.)
Strange Maps: 254 - Ludacris' Rap Map of US Area Codes
Where Ludacris keeps his weeding implements. Why does he hate the Nine-One-Eight?
Who needs security when you have a robot? | ajc.com
The owner of O'Terrill's Irish Pub in downtown Atlanta has built a robot to shoo away vagrants and drug dealers loitering on his property and that of a nearby daycare center. The robot has a bright spotlight, a sound system tied to the owner's walkie-talkie, and a low-power water cannon. "Terrill says deploying the robot has helped keep crime in check, preventing car break-ins and drug deals and stopping vandals from trashing the day care center." Here's video of the "Bum-Bot" in action. (Via Engadget and Ace.)
Crunchy Con - Yes, Dear Leader, we can!
O-Ba-Ma! O-Ba-Ma! "This is not a political campaign, this is a cult of personality. I can't believe that I'm saying this, but more of this gaggy Dear Leader stuff from Obama worshipers I have to watch, the more I appreciate Hillary Clinton's plain old milk-curdling nastiness. Watch for yourself (but be warned: the chant gets stuck in your head, like a fresh dog turd in the grooves of your sandals)."
Will I still be blogging at age 108? Olive Riley from Australia is! (Via On the Other Foot.)
meeciteewurkor: TCCL's Interlibrary Loan Program
Mee tries it. Mee likes it. If Tulsa's library system doesn't have a book, they can get it for you, for as little as $1.
Altered art: "Who would have guessed that when you remove Garfield from the Garfield comic strips, the result is an even better comic about schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, and the empty desperation of modern life?" (Via Julie R. Neidlinger.)
The Editors on Health Care & Presidential Politics on National Review Online
"Either [Obama's or Clinton's] plan would lead us to a government monopoly on health care, albeit slightly faster in Clinton's case. Senator John McCain's plan, in contrast, eliminates the roadblocks the government has erected on the way to a better system of financing health care." McCain would give taxpayers a tax credit for buying their own health insurance and create a nationwide market for it.
National Review: Michael Barone: Throw Out the Old Electoral Maps
Assume nothing about blue and red states based on past performance: "If I were running the McCain or Obama campaign, I would be doing in-depth polling and focus groups in 30 to 40 states -- and nationally, as well -- trying to determine which voting groups are moving or moveable toward my candidate and which are moving or moveable the other way."
The American Spectator: Archer Daniels Meltdown
Another reason to worry about ethanol: "Alcohol fuels may constitute a new type of fire hazard because they are harder to extinguish than gasoline fires and require new types of fire-extinguishing equipment and training."
National Review: Jay Nordlinger: Only a few notes...
Nordlinger shares tales of dining with William F. Buckley Jr. at barbecue and burger joints, with many other anecdotes.
Rocks In My Dryer: Talk Amongst Yourselves: Home Alone!
A mom symposium: When is a child old enough to be home by himself?
flightglobal.com: Seattle-area politicians seething over Boeing tanker defeat
Bad news for Boeing, good news for Mobile, Ala.: The US Air Force picked the Northrup Grumman KC-45A as the next-generation aerial refueling aircraft. The KC-45A will be based on the Airbus A330. The Mobile facility, the former Brookley Air Force Base, which closed in the late '60s, will also be used for final assembly of the freighter version of the A330, bringing about 1800 jobs to Mobile.
Tulsa's oldest scratch bakery is back in business after a fire in early 2007. Indie Tulsa has the mouth-watering details.
Beyond Binary: Microsoft chops Vista retail prices
Microsoft thinks Vista sales are lagging because of price and hardware requirements, so they're lowering the price. The real flaw in Vista is that it was created to fix problems not for the end-user, but for the music and video industry. (Via Mister Snitch.)
