This is the sign that Norman is placing next to its flashing yellow arrow installs. (This one is at 12th Ave SE and Classen Blvd.) You can’t see the arrow on the actual signal because it’s…well…flashing.
Oh construction signs. Always a font of errors. Here we have a US 9 shield. US 9 can be found in New Jersey (where it makes up half of the famed duo of US1&9) and New York (where among other things it runs down Broadway and ends in a cul-de-sac next to I-87 at the Canadian border. This sign…is in Oklahoma, as the billboard in the background clearly indicates. It should be an OK-9 shield. Whoops.
So it’s been ages since I used this tumblr. Let’s see if I can change that.
The Oklahoman has an article which includes potential candidates in the 2010 election for Governor. Here’s the list:
Republicans:
Democrats:
It should be noted that I had the opportunity to chat with Jari Askins once, at the All-State academic meet one year. She asked how it had went at the dinner afterwards, and I attempted to explain one of the questions that had tripped me up. She ended up thoroughly confused and excused herself to go talk to someone else. So I might end up voting for her just so that there’s someone in the list of governors I could point to and have an amusing anecdote about.
The District of Columbia has wanted to elect people to Congress forever. D.C. would really like something resembling the rights a real state gets—Republicans tend to oppose this because it would give the Democrats two Senate seats for all eternity—but really, anything would be nice. They’re kinda bitter about it, you see, going as far as to put “TAXATION WITHOUT REPRESENTATION” in bright blue lettering on the bottom of their license plates.
The Senate is considering a bill right now (S. 160) that will increase the size of the House of Representatives from 435 members to 437. D.C. would get one of the new Congresscritters, and the other one would go to Utah. Utah always votes Republican in anything, so it would be a somewhat balanced way to go. Of course, there’s a Census coming up soon, and after that the seats are reapportioned, so it’s no telling in which party’s hands the new seat would ultimately end up.
Of course, it’s probably a moot point anyway. You see, the sections of the Constitution referring to Congress, specifically Article I, Section 2, refers to “states” a lot. D.C. isn’t a state, so sound the losing horns, cause it’s likely that it’s gonna get thrown out by the Supreme Court.
So, what could you do? Well, you could try making D.C. a state. Problem is, the Republicans would object, cause, you know, the whole eternal Democrat thing. Plus that would cause the amusing side-effect of a part of the Constitution becoming unconstitutional—one section says that D.C. should be governed by Congress, while another section says that every state should be run in the form of a republic, which is contradictory, of course. So maybe we should try that just for the sheer fun of watching John Roberts’s head explode. (Faithfully.)
Or you could do away with D.C. altogether, or at least radically shrink it so only the real goverment functions are within its boundaries. The problem is, Maryland doesn’t want anything to do with D.C. So here’s what I propose—shrink the district, cede the rest to a real state. Throw the other 49 states into a hat and have some overweight senator draw one out. Whichever state it is, congratulations! You now have 68.3 brand new square miles of land! Of course, the fun in this would be if D.C. happens to end up attached to some state that is radically opposite from the way D.C. is in every way. Like, say, Mississippi.
When I was growing up as a kid, I had one of those little analog alarm clocks with the two little bells on top and the clapper in the middle. I hated analog clocks, and still do; if they had outlawed analog clocks at the same time they did analog television I would have cheered loudly and wrote notes of congratulations to all the legislators in the Hart Senate Office Building. However, as a little kid, the clock’s analogness was outweighed by the virture that the clock’s hands and digits glowed in the dark.
One thing that fascinated me about it, however, was how the alarm behaved on it. Analog clocks, you see, can’t distinguish between AM and PM—for all they know a day has twelve hours, 1 through 12. This means if at ten PM you set your clock for eleven and go to sleep, you will be woken up not at eleven AM, but one hour later at eleven PM, and if you switch the alarm on and off, the alarm will sound again at the desired time.
This seems like an obvious flaw, and apparently the engineers of the world got together and decided to allow digital clocks the feature of distinguishing between AM and PM. Now just about every clock will display a little LED dot denoting that it’s after noon. One wonders why they bothered, however; if you go to bed at 10 PM you’re likely going to wake up much earlier than 10:01 AM. Perhaps engineers are the sort of people who need more than twelve hours of sleep.
So, they solved a problem that didn’t really need to be solved, and as naturally happens when this happens, introduces a new problem that really didn’t need to be introduced. I call it the daypart error.
Everyone’s done it at least once; you go to bed intending to wake up at 9:00 AM. When you awake, it’s 10:30, and you wonder what the hell was in that punch you drank at that party last night, anyway, because you slept through the awful din your alarm clock normally produces. You check the clock. Sure enough, it’s cheerfully anticipating the duty of waking you up at 9:00 PM.
This seems like a simple thing to check for, and yet I’ve been bitten by this damn problem twice and ended up late to work because of it. Fortunately, I’m apparently too indispensible for people at work to chastise me about it and risk me deciding to set out about getting a job that pays more, but really, this is a problem that shouldn’t exist in the first place. If I set my clock for 2, I want the next available 2 o’clock to be the time when I’m rudely awakened. I don’t want to wake up at 2 AM if it’s 4 AM when I’m setting the damn alarm.
Maybe analog clocks aren’t so bad after all.
Hmmm. Just went through the SH-29/29A intersection on the 19th and it now has meat cleavers through and through. Maybe ODOT reads what I write. Scary?
Today two people were shot and killed at a Toys ‘R Us in California.
Earlier in the morning, a Wal-Mart was opened in New York and the man who unlocked the doors was trampled to death by customers. When they came over the intercom to announce the store was closing because someone died people refused to quit shopping, shouting things such as “I’ve been in line since yesterday morning!”
Black Friday must be stopped.
Apparently when ODOT went through and redid the SH-29/29A intersection, they didn’t bring enough SH-29A shields. The JCT assemblies on both directions of SH-29 still have the old circular route shields. Weird.
