Well, it's filing time again.
I know you're busy. I can see that faraway look in your eye.
Today (Wednesday, December 4, 2024) is the final day of the filing period for the 2025 Oklahoma school board elections. Only two seats out of 17 in Tulsa County have more than one candidate, and two seats (in Owasso and Collinsville) have no candidates at all. On BatesLine.com, I’ve got the list of candidates from Day 1 and Day 2 of filing, and some thoughts on patriotism, the public schools, and school board elections, along with an attempt at a parody of a Ray Charles cover.
Santa’s at Philbrook: This year is my dad’s 20th as a Real-Bearded Santa, and once again he’s making several appearances at Philbrook Museum’s Festival. His first outing was last Friday, and he’ll be there this Friday and Saturday (December 6th & 7th), Friday the 13th, Wednesday the 18th, and Saturday and Sunday, December 21st & 22nd). This year, the Philbrook Festival includes access to the galleries and to the special show of American art from the Philadelphia Academy of Fine Arts, including two monumental paintings of George Washington, and works by Edward Hopper, Thomas Moran, and Winslow Homer.
Delta Cafe closing: Always sad to see an old family-favorite restaurant close down. Delta Cafe on 51st west of Yale is closing for good; Thursday, December 5, 2024, is its last day of business. It was the last surviving location of a once mighty chain that had several Tulsa locations (41st and Garnett, 34th and Peoria among them). In pre-internet days, I was so enamored of Southern-style “meat-and-three” restaurants that I started compiling a list from an early-day edition of Street Atlas USA on CD-ROM. Cracker Barrel has overwhelmed that market.
This particular Delta Cafe was our regular go-to for Sunday lunch after church, located just a little more than a mile east of where we worshipped, with a nice variety of choices and a great selection of Southern-style vegetables. There would usually be long lines, and we’d wait on a sofa while the kids read the Sunday funnies and played with a manual typewriter. My usual was the Vegetable Heaven plate: small blackeyed pea salad with oil and vinegar dressing, red beans and rice, baked squash casserole, greens, plus sweet potato casserole, which was usually the vegetable of the day. Or I might get Cajun grilled catfish. Monterey Chicken (grilled chicken breast with swiss and cheddar cheese, bacon, and diced tomatoes) was a good low-carb option. My wife would ask for honey to go with our dinner rolls.
At some point, we stopped going as often. My oldest son joined Tulsa Youth Symphony, so we no longer had time for leisurely Sunday lunches. Quality dipped for a while, but I’ve heard that it recovered after local management took over this location when the rest of the chain shut down.
This year, we’ve also lost Helen of Troy (often the kids’ choice for birthday dinner — we loved the lamb shank), Shiloh’s (where I’d meet Mom for lunch), My Thai Cafe (a favorite for carryout). We still mourn Mod’s Gelato & Crepes. Sad to see the end of places that were such a big part of our life as a family.
From the archives: I was reminiscing this week about our family’s 2016 Thanksgiving Day. We celebrated at New Zealand’s oldest continuously licensed pub, the Kentish Inn in Waiuku, south of Auckland, then toured the Hobbiton Movie Set, built for Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings trilogy and rebuilt permanently for The Hobbit trilogy. We finished the day at a breathtaking spot: The Blue Spring and the Waihou River near Putaruru. I wrote about the experience in 2019. When I returned to New Zealand on my own in 2017, on the way home from Australia, I made a point of visiting again. I was happy to read that the Te Waihou Walkway is soon to reopen a year after a rockslide forced its closure.
I enjoyed rereading some of the articles I posted in January 2019. You might enjoy them too:
Covington Catholic and the Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect: Quantum physicist Murray Gell-Mann discovered the phenomenon and novelist Michael Crichton distilled it: “You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well…. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues… and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know.” Full-context video contradicting mainstream news stories ought to help counter Gell-Mann Amnesia, even at the local level.
BatesLine retrospective: The "bickering Tulsa City Councilors" narrative: Inspired by the previous item, I traced the bickering theme back through 10 years of City Council history, how it was used to gaslight voters who should have known better.
Shawnee to Sapulpa by electric interurban: The wild nineteen-teens plans for long-distance electric trains criss-crossing Oklahoma which never came to fruition.
Swanson County, Oklahoma's original 77th county: A short-lived subdivision.
Can the blogosphere be reconnected?: A reminiscence about the early days of blogging, before the advent of social media, when we used trackbacks, blogrolls, Technorati, The Truth Laid Bear Ecosystem, blog carnivals, and RSS feeds to connect with readers and with other bloggers. We were all lured in by the convenience of social media sites to connect with our audience and one another, and then the algorithms took over.
30 years ago: A new engagement: A quick link back to my reminiscences on the 20th anniversary of the day I proposed to my wife.