Steel guitarist Bobby Koefer, one of the last surviving members of the Texas Playboys who recorded and toured with Bob Wills, has died at the age of 95. Here is Bobby's obituary, written by western swing historian Buddy McPeters for publication here at BatesLine: John Robert 'Bobby' Koefer, passed away...
Composite image of August 21, 2017, total solar eclipse, Madras, Oregon. Photo Credit: (NASA/Aubrey Gemignani) Monday, April 8, 2024, will be the nearest a total solar eclipse has come to Tulsa in my lifetime. The path of totality stretches from south Texas to northern New England. Oklahoma southeast of...
The Oklahoma Statewide Virtual Charter School Board has authorized an explicitly Roman Catholic virtual charter school, St. Isidore of Seville Catholic Virtual School, to begin operation in the 2024-2025 school year. Attorney General Gentner Drummond, a pretend-conservative and Biden for President donor who won the GOP nomination with the help...
Pre-election campaign contributions and expenditures reports
In my pre-presidential primary post, I provide a detailed explanation of the delegate allocation process for Oklahoma. As I mentioned in the same post, I am voting for Florida Governor Ron DeSantis in the 2024 Oklahoma Republican Primary. A BatesLine reader asked me why the names of so many candidates...
Edited from the version originally published on December 25, 2012 Merry Christmas to anyone who happens by BatesLine today. This Advent (2023) I renewed an earlier attempt to turn the 4-arm, 5-globe reproduction Victorian streetlamp in front of our house into a kind of Advent candelabra. I installed three purple...
Another blog article started long ago, July 26, 2021, but never quite finished, until now. In 1982, Oklahoma was celebrating its 75th anniversary, the Diamond Jubilee of statehood, and it was one of the focuses (along with Korea) of the Smithsonian Institution's 1982 Festival of American Folklife. The program book...
Tulsa Public Schools made the Mail Online on July 30, 2023, as one of 7 school districts in the US with active contracts for Confucius Classrooms, a propaganda outreach of the Chinese Communist Party. China is funding America's public schools to the tune of $17 million dollars, it has been...
I have finally gotten around to reading Killers of the Flower Moon by David Grann, in anticipation of the Martin Scorsese film to be released in October. I'm about halfway through, and I was skimming ahead. (It's OK. I already knew who the bad guys were.) I was surprised to...
First-ever Wayback Machine snapshot of BatesLine.com, from August 5, 2003 Twenty years ago today at 6:01 am, the first blog entry at batesline.com came into being, an automatically generated entry proclaiming, "MovableType 2.63 has been successfully installed!" The first blog entry authored by a human followed at 12:22 pm,...
A recent tweet from Jeremy Tate, founder and CEO of the Classic Learning Test (CLT): Classical education is fundamental an educational [sic] it what it means to be fully human. It is not a politically conservative alternative to the already politically hijacked mainstream education. Instead, it is an education in...
A rain-filled mikveh (ritual immersion pool) at Korazim National Park, Israel. Photo © 2023 by Michael D. Bates, all rights reserved. Here are a couple of useful resources that I recently encountered, one very old, one new, in support of the view that Christian baptism is for those only...
The incumbent and challenger in the Tulsa School Board District 1 race have each raised over $50,000 according to campaign contribution and expenditures reports filed with the Tulsa Public Schools district clerk. As of the March 20, 2023, close of the pre-election reporting period, Democrat incumbent Stacey Woolley had raised...
More commentary opposed to SQ 820, on the ballot this Tuesday, March 7, 2023. (My earlier SQ 820 blog post covers campaign finances, the actual text of the proposition, and more voices against the proposition.) Twitter user Chels (@ChesterTweet) has a link-rich thread "explaining why every Oklahoman should vote...
The Route 66 Christmas Chute on Dewey Avenue in downtown Sapulpa, Oklahoma, has just two more nights to run, but it continues to be a popular attraction two months after its opening on November 3, 2022. Ten overhanging steel structures decorated with a variety of themes stand in the...
Edited from the version originally published on December 25, 2012 Merry Christmas to anyone who happens by BatesLine today. As a Holland Hall high school student, I attended and sang in the annual service of Christmas lessons and carols at Trinity Episcopal Church, modeled after the annual Christmas Eve service...
In a column last week on the role ritual and prohibitions play in group identity for Christians, Rod Dreher recalled a passage in Natural Symbols: Explorations in Cosmology by Mary Douglas about Irish resistance to the Roman Catholic Church's decision to abolish the Friday fast and allowing meat on Fridays....
An election eve assortment of thoughts: Last week, I attended and live-tweeted the Tuesday, November 1, 2022, Red Wave rally in Oklahoma City featuring Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, Gov. Kevin Stitt, and State Superintendent nominee Ryan Walters; the Wednesday Tulsa rally with Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin, and a Wednesday lunch-time...
The City of Tulsa's odd and oft-changed election process comes to its 2022 conclusion Tuesday with runoffs in three of nine Tulsa City Council seats. Three incumbents, all registered to vote as Democrats, failed to reach the 50% threshold in the August general election and so face a runoff. The...
Looks like Tulsa's billionaire overlords aren't as competent as they pretend to be. If they're going to insist on being in charge and push us to elect their minions, couldn't they at least show some signs of competence? And maybe a little frugality along the way?
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