March 2009 Archives
Met Office: UK shipping forecast
How to convey the weather for a wide swath of the sea into the smallest number of words possible.
Codename, codeword or project name: create them all using the generator
Randomly picks a term from each of up to three categories. My favorite combo so far: Teal Maggot Fairfax.
Maps of Indian Territory, the Dawes Act, and Will Rogers' Enrollment Case File
From the National Archives, maps of Indian Territory in 1885 and 1891, and Dawes Commission documents pertaining to Clement V. Rogers and his son, William Penn ("Will") Rogers.
internetmonk.com: Avoiding Death by Nostalgia: My Denomination (The SBC) Today
Is the "rope of sand" falling apart? Did the conservative resurgence unwittingly sow the seeds of the SBC's eventual dissolution? And is that even a bad thing? "So Southern Baptists began to produce young people, young pastors and young professors who were serious about putting scripture first.... above denomination[,] tradition[,] custom[,] culture and habit[,] above 'the way Southern Baptists have always done it'[,] above Southern Baptist ways of justifying what Southern Baptists do..... Gone are the days when Nashville (or the state convention office) determined the programs and priorities of every SBC church."
Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable « Clay Shirky
It's 1500 all over again: "Round and round this goes, with the people committed to saving newspapers demanding to know 'If the old model is broken, what will work in its place?' To which the answer is: Nothing. Nothing will work. There is no general model for newspapers to replace the one the internet just broke.
"With the old economics destroyed, organizational forms perfected for industrial production have to be replaced with structures optimized for digital data. It makes increasingly less sense even to talk about a publishing industry, because the core problem publishing solves -- the incredible difficulty, complexity, and expense of making something available to the public -- has stopped being a problem....
"That is what real revolutions are like. The old stuff gets broken faster than the new stuff is put in its place. The importance of any given experiment isn't apparent at the moment it appears; big changes stall, small changes spread. Even the revolutionaries can't predict what will happen....
"The newspaper people often note that newspapers benefit society as a whole. This is true, but irrelevant to the problem at hand; 'You're gonna miss us when we're gone!' has never been much of a business model. So who covers all that news if some significant fraction of the currently employed newspaper people lose their jobs?
"I don't know. Nobody knows. We're collectively living through 1500, when it's easier to see what's broken than what will replace it. "
(Via Ace.)
screedblog » So this fellow sends a manifesto
James Lileks brilliantly fisks Amitai Etzioni's redistributionist manifesto.
Library of Congress photo, "Tulsa, Oklahoma. Residental street," 1942
Do you recognize this church? It rings a bell, but I can't place it. Is it still standing?
YouTube - Whadayatalk? Whadayatalk? ("Rock Island" on the Green Line)
A group of Boston University students reenact the opening number from The Music Man on a Comm. Ave. streetcar. (Via Mark Evanier.)
Herb Meyer: "Ronald Reagan was the first Western leader whose objective was to win. Now I suggest to you that there is a gigantic difference between playing not to lose and playing to win. It's different emotionally, it's different psychologically, and, of course, it's different practically.... It was Reagan's judgment that the time had come to play offense--that they [the Soviets] could be had. When he made that decision ... it flowed from a decision to play to win."
The Associated Press: Wireless-only households state-by-state
We're number one! 26.2% of Oklahoma households, 25.1% of adults rely solely on wireless phone service.
Pajamas Media » My Fellow Conservatives, Let's Be Bad Guys!
Stephen Green writes: "No matter what we do, we're painted as the villains. So let's twirl our mustaches and get to work....
"We cannot buy our way into friendship in Washington for the next four years. We aren't going to become popular by playing along with Harry Reid or Nancy Pelosi or the president....
"Republicans spent the last eight years trying to do the "smart" thing, by buying out the Democratic agenda.... Well, we've tried the smart thing and all it got us was a bigger, more meddlesome government. Now it's time to do the right thing....
"Most importantly, we need to push for a sunset provision to all this so-called 'stimulus spending.'...As political junkies, we know the stimulus was really Porkzilla, with most of the "emergency" spending of this monster back-loaded into 2011 or beyond. The Democrats can be cornered on this one -- demand that any back-end spending provision expire as soon as the economy returns to positive growth."
Salon: Camille Paglia on Rush Limbaugh
"Only ignoramuses believe that Rush speaks for the Republican Party. On the contrary, Rush as a proponent of heartland conservatism has waged open warfare with the Washington party establishment for years. And I'm sick of people impugning Rush's wealth and lifestyle, which is no different from that of another virtuoso broadcaster who hit it big -- Oprah Winfrey. Rush Limbaugh is an embodiment of the American dream: He slowly rose from obscurity to fame on the basis of his own talent and grit. Every penny Rush has earned was the result of his rapport with a vast audience who felt shut out and silenced by the liberal monopoly of major media."
WillCollier.com: Tea Party Conservatives vs. Dinner Party Conservatives
"The most recent splash from the Dinner Party crowd comes from David Frum, who appears well on his way to becoming the Kevin Phillips of his generation. Frum's nasty jeremiad against decidedly-Tea-Party Rush Limbaugh fit so well into the media blitz being pushed out of the White House by Clinton slime masters James Carville and Paul Begala that Frum was granted not just multiple column-inches, but also the cover of the official weekly of the Obama Administration, Newsweek. Frum is already basking in his own bath of what he once called Strange New Respect, and undoubtably he'll receive plenty of smug adulation at his next few Georgetown dinner parties.
"Frum has always loved the idea of playing Cassandra; his last big splash came from the polemic 'Dead Right' in 1994, with similar arguments for shutting out the conservative base of the GOP in favor of elite opinion. As noted previously, this particular call to disarm was delightfully thrown on history's ash heap less than three months after its publication, when the Tea Party Conservatives of that age overthrew a four-decades-entrenched Democratic majority in Congress. Not much of anybody credited 'Dead Right' as being a catalyst for the Republican Revolution--but one Rush H. Limbaugh, III, a Missouri junior-college dropout and former D.J., was widely touted at the time as 'the majority maker.' It wouldn't surprise me one bit if that still sticks in the craw of the Yale-and-Harvard-approved Frum."
YouTube - Benny Goodman and Red Norvo (1960)
Benny Goodman's 10-piece ensemble swings out with Goodman on clarinet, Red Norvo on marimba, Jimmy Wyble on guitar: "The World is Waiting For the Sunrise."
Internet Archive: Details: 1949 episode of the TV series "Captain Video"
Amazing! Stupendous! Spacemen! Cowboys! Vacuum tubes! Aliens in Roman costumes with Latin names! "Hermes Lycos calling Regus of Tersen!" Atomic disintegration and reassembly for interplanetary travel! (You thought Gene Roddenberry came up with that.) The bad guy from the planet Tersen looks like Liberace with a widow's peak, pointy eyebrows and sideburns, and a soul patch. The evil Dr. Pauli has a pencil-thin mustache and smokes. About 11 minutes in there's a patriotic commercial message: "Freedom is every American's job, Video Rangers!" About 20 minutes in, the second commercial break condemns discrimination and prejudice based on race or religion and urges friendship.
Ogle Madness II: East Region, Lower Bracket! at The Lost Ogle
It's Pioneer Woman Ree Drummond vs. diminutive OKC sports talker Al Eschbach in round one of The Lost Ogle's second annual Oklahoma Celebrity Tournament. Voting ends at midnight. Go vote!
Neither Moderate Nor Centrist - Forbes.com
Peter Robinson, a speechwriter in the Reagan administration writes:
"'To see what is in front of one's nose,' George Orwell famously asserted, 'needs a constant struggle.' Congratulations this week to three journalists who have finally taken up that constant struggle: Christopher Buckley, David Gergen and David Brooks....
"[A] deep, recurring pattern of American life has asserted itself yet again: the cluelessness of the elite. Buckley, Gergen and Brooks all attended expensive private universities, then spent their careers moving among the wealthy and powerful who inhabit the seaboard corridor running from Washington to Boston. If any of the three strolled uninvited into a cocktail party in Georgetown, Cambridge or New Haven, the hostess would emit yelps of delight. Yet all three originally got Obama wrong.
"Contrast Buckley, Gergen and Brooks with, let us say, Rush Limbaugh, whose appearance at any chic cocktail party would cause the hostess to faint dead away, or with Thomas Sowell, who occupies probably the most unfashionable position in the country, that of a black conservative. Limbaugh and Sowell both got Obama right from the very get-go. 'Just what evidence do you have,' Sowell replied when I asked, shortly before the election, whether he considered Obama a centrist, 'that he's anything but a hard-left ideologue?'
"The elite journalists, I repeat, got Obama wrong. The troglodytes got him right. As our national drama continues to unfold, bear that in mind."
(Via Melissa Clouthier.)
Tulsa City Council: Community Gardens
Minutes of the Feb. 24, 2009, Urban and Economic Development committee meeting, with a link to the backup packet, including the text of the community gardens ordinance, minutes from the TMAPC hearing, and public comments and letters on the idea.
"Guitar Hero" for the classical set: Two pianists, looking at a tablet PC and a repeater monitor perched on the music rack of a grand piano, which is displaying scanned public domain scores found on the Internet, with a foot-operated gadget for turning the virtual page.
Houston - Hair Balls - Houston Zoo To Unveil OH DEAR GOD THAT IS CUTE
Zoo residents comment on the arrival of Toby, the adorable red panda (looks like a cross between a fox and a raccoon).
King Daevid MacKenzie: Paul Harvey mash-up, "The Bong"
With a brilliant bit of editing, Paul Harvey is advertising a product that will make you hear your old CDs like you've never heard them before. And make you crave Fritos.
UCSD: A catalog of political cartoons by Dr. Seuss
"... for two years, 1941-1943, [Theodor Seuss Geisel] was the chief editorial cartoonist for the New York newspaper PM (1940-1948), and for that journal he drew over 400 editorial cartoons. The Dr. Seuss Collection in the Mandeville Special Collections Library at the University of California, San Diego, contains the original drawings and/or newspaper clippings of all of these cartoons. This website makes these cartoons available to all internet users." (Via Meryl Yourish, who posts a cartoon that's still timely.)
iowahawk: This Post Brought to You By the Green Movement
No satire this time. It's about the death of a Togolese boy that iowahawk sponsored for five years through Childreach: "Bakouma was one of approximately one million people who died of malaria last year. Almost all of them were like him: poor, young, and African. And almost all of those deaths could have been prevented through vaccines, insecticide-treated netting, and (gasp) DDT spraying.... [A]1996 DDT ban in South Africa, pushed by environmental groups, led to a malaria epidemic with over 60,000 cases reported in 2000. After DDT spraying resumed in 2001, infections dropped 80% in one year. Facing a mounting death toll across Africa the World Heath Organization and USAID have recently lent support to IRS using DDT, but its adoption continues to be opposed by environmental extremists relying on shoddy science and fearmongering."
Wir Ain Leid - The Pronunciation of Scots Dialects
We're at that point in the Thomas the Tank Engine: The Complete Collection where Douglas and Donald, the twin Scottish engines, enter the story, and all of their dialog is written in Scots. I shudna fash m'self, but I like to get the pronunciation right. You also need their Scots orthography guide and the page for the specific Scots dialect (links from this map), plus a pronunciation guide to IPA.
This collection of Scots words may come in handy too: "I'm fair forfochen."
