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Christopher Alexander: Finding patterns, and God, in urban design
From the BatesLine Bookshelf, a very occasional feature on authors and books that have influenced me: Christopher Alexander was an architect, but he might more appropriately have been called a philosopher of the built environment. He spent his career trying to describe and name the qualities that make a place...
Tulsa and Oklahoma historical maps and aerial photos
What was here? Who owned it? What did it look like? There are a number of resources available for reconstructing Oklahoma's geographical past, and they're easier to use than ever. These are my go-tos when researching the history of a neighborhood or answering questions about the past. This is an...
Oil in Oklahoma: Tulsa TV 50 years ago
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...
Tulsa Election 2020: Ty Walker for Mayor
What looked like a sleepy re-election run, for Tulsa Mayor GT Bynum IV as recently as the beginning of May, with one declared opponent and a perennial candidate in jail, turned into a free-for-all. As soon as he had some tough decisions to make, the smiley guy that everyone...
Coronavirus notes: 2020/03/16
News and opinion on the coronavirus plague, in reverse chronological order (mostly): Here is a coronavirus COVID-19 dashboard and interactive map showing current numbers of cases from the Center for Systems Science and Engineering at Johns Hopkins University. Here is the spreadsheet that feeds the map. As of 7 a.m....
Scott Pendleton for Tulsa school board, Office 5
The Tulsa school district needs drastic reform. Enrollment and attendance are dropping, teachers are fleeing, and more and more schools are closing. In the first quarter of Fiscal Year 2016, the Tulsa district had an Average Daily Membership of 39,167. Four years later, ADM for the first quarter of FY2020...
Tulsa School Board Office 5: Kelsey Royce questionnaire response
Kelsey Royce, candidate for Tulsa Public Schools Office 5, responds to the BatesLine questionnaire.
Farewell to Mod's Coffee & Crepes
This coming Saturday, December 16, 2017, Mod's Coffee and Crepes will close its doors after seven years in business. Yesterday was the last chance to enjoy one of the things we love about Mod's -- gluten-free crepes available on Tuesdays. A week ago Tuesday we gathered there to celebrate...
How to reset file and folder permissions on an NTFS drive
This was the problem: I had a hard drive that I took out of a Windows XP laptop and put into an external case. (The laptop's AC system failed; an adapter could no longer power the system or charge the battery.) The drive was formatted for NTFS, so files had...
Lee Roy Chapman, RIP: "To force it on eyes that don't want to see it"
A memorial service for Lee Roy Chapman will be held Wednesday, October 14, 2015, at 4:00 p.m. at Cain's Ballroom. All are welcome. A fund for the benefit of his five-year-old son, Kasper, has been set up at GoFundMe. Friends are sharing memories on the "Remembering Lee Roy Chapman" page...
Wifi woes
It seemed like a good idea: Head to a coffeehouse this afternoon with my daughter as she worked on her homework for Monday. We'd have a change of scenery from home, get some lunch, and I'd be there to keep her on track without hovering too closely. For whatever reason,...
Election day 2014 in Florida -- and the aftermath
It was a good day, a better day that anyone expected, a real wave election. The reaction of my local liberal friends on Facebook reveal their contempt for the state where they live, their bigoted opinions of conservatives, and their disconnect from political reality. One wrote a very apt "chin-up"...
June 8, 1974: Tulsa's first big tornado disaster
Forty years ago today, June 8, 1974, there was a massive tornado outbreak and widespread flash flooding in northeastern Oklahoma. At least 10 tornadoes touched down (possibly more from the long-track supercell that killed 12 Drumright residents and two others). For Tulsans who were kids in the '70s, it was...
British history, county boundaries, and detached parts
Some links of interest to me and possibly no one else within a 500 mile radius: (Remember, "blog" is short for "weblog," a log of things found on the World Wide Web.) Some games for testing your knowledge of historic counties of Britain and Ireland: Historic Counties of Scotland: See...
<em>Locaciones</em> and <em>Rumble Fish</em>
On Wednesday night, my wife and I went to Circle Cinema to see a double-feature: Locaciones: Buscando a Rusty James (Locations: Looking for Rusty James") followed by Rumble Fish, the 1983 Francis Ford Coppola film based on the novel by S. E. Hinton. The first film at the Circle Cinema...
Downtown Tulsa needs demolition limits, regulatory and tax relief
Route 66 "planter" and "nature band-aid" attempt to distract from ugliness of Tulsa Community College surface parking lot. UPDATE 2019/11/29: I'm revisiting this entry years later, as Strong Towns uses Black Friday to call attention to parking minimums, zoning laws that require a minimum number of parking spaces based...
Creating a DVD from multiple Handycam mini-DVDs
Some tech notes so I don't forget how I did this. Over this last weekend, my middle and youngest children were in a production of "The Music Man Jr.," a simplified, hour-long version of the Meredith Willson musical. (The cast, mainly elementary and middle-school aged children in the Classical Conversations...
Saving East Germany's near ruins -- and Tulsa's?
Duane Lester, the All-American Blogger, links to an article in Der Spiegel about a photographer, Stefan Koppelkamm, who toured former East Germany in 1990 and 1991, shortly after the fall of the Berlin Wall, and returned a dozen years later, re-photographing the buildings he captured twenty years ago. These buildings...
MEND marks 25 years
Earlier this evening, I attended the annual fundraising banquet for MEND Medical Clinic and Pregnancy Resource Center. MEND was founded in 1987 to provide pregnant women in crisis pregnancies in the Tulsa area with the resources they need to say "yes" to the new life growing within. In 2011, MEND...
Tulsa's yacht-guest subculture
Once in a while I come across a phrase that captures in 20 words what I've tried and failed to say in 2,000. It's an aphorism by cartoonist Hugh MacLeod (@gapingvoid @hughcards on Twitter), tweeted by former Louisiana Governor and dark-horse presidential candidate Buddy Roemer: "Real success comes not from...
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