An Oklahoma conversation

I walked out of the airport in Oklahoma city towards the Airport Express shuttle.

"Oh, hello," said the driver pleasantly, "you live over on 48th, don't you?". It's a sign that you are traveling a bit too often when a random Airport Express shuttle driver recognizes you and can drive you home without you having to give him directions.

"Give me a minute," he said, "the OU-Gonzaga game is gonna be ending soon." So, we sat in the airport parking lot and listened to the radio commentary. "We're up by two and have the ball," he told me by way of explanation. OU missed the shot. "Eeew," we said together and waited tensely as the commentator said that Gonzaga had rebounded and was driving up.

"They need to take a 3-point shot."

On the radio, a Gonzaga guard pulled up and made a shot ... and it was blocked and an OU player got it and threw it downcourt and now there was only 0.2 seconds left on the clock. OU won! We cheered and then he started the shuttle van and we were on our way.

"So did you have any damage because of the ice storm?," he asked me.

"No, our elms are still pretty young. They doubled down from the weight of the ice, but snapped right back up."

"Not everyone was that lucky."

"People in older neighborhoods lost a lot of trees," I agreed.

"We're having company over the holidays, so all Tuesday, I was out clearing out the fallen trees. My daughter sent my grandsons to come help."

"Good for you, to have young fellows to help you do stuff."

"My wife's parents lost power for a day, so they came and stayed with us."

"I hear that 150,000 people in rural Oklahoma still don't have power," I remarked.

"Yes, but rural folks can take care of themselves better. So, OG&E has been working on the built-up parts."

"That's true about rural folks. I have a friend in Noble who said he simply went out and cranked his generator when the power went out. I don't think I would have ever had a generator."

"Most rural folks are on propane anyway, so they have heat."

"Won't do them any good if they went hunting. All the meat's gonna spoil," I suggested.

"Yeah, never thought of that."

The tall tale waitress

I went out with a couple of colleagues to a restaurant today (I'm in Washington DC) to celebrate having survived a bout of food poisoning. Well, not quite celebrate. I didn't drink because I didn't want to risk upsetting my stomach again.

"You are so lucky that you guys are done with work," our waitress informed us, "This is my second job, so here I am."

"So what do you do in your first job?," my first colleague asked, rising to the bait.

"I teach mentally disabled children, and then I come here and work four hours."

"Well, at least then you get to go back to your boyfriend, while we have to be here the rest of the week," he observed.

"Oh, I'd better not have a boyfriend," she countered, showing us her ring, "I'm married. My husband is a fire fighter. He also works two shifts."

Then while serving us the food, she informed my colleague (who she'd identified as being the most amenable to her charms) "my dad's in the military, so I'm used to being poor."

I couldn't take it any more at that point. "And I suppose you walked all the way to work today."

"Actually, yes," she said, "and my shoe lace broke.". She paused a bit, grinned and asked, "You guys are going to give me a $100 tip, aren't you?".

"Well, I can buy you a new shoe lace" said the third colleague who'd also been quiet up to that point.

The two of us wanted to leave her a typical 20% tip, but the first colleague overruled us.  He added enough to the pot to make it a 35% tip. Her tall tales worked.

Holiday letter

Our holiday email this year was a lot easier to write, thanks to the blog ... Here it is (with redactions to make it suitable for the Internet):

S1 has started kindergarten -- a source of great pride, incidentally -- and is at the age where he trusts but wants to verify. S2 is in her sweet-little-girl years -- we know it won't last, but we're still enjoying it any how. The kids are now old enough that we did a couple of road trips this summer -- to Chicago and to Washington DC. It was a lot of fun. Perhaps a bit more fun in retrospect than in real-time ... A. and I went to Australia and visited the Great Barrier Reef this year (our 10th wedding anniversary). It was the trip of a lifetime, but maybe for the 20th we'll go this route instead. The whole family also went with a couple of neighbors to a Nature Conservancy managed park here in Oklahoma. S1 and I went together to a couple of OU football games. Getting him started early!

Work continues to be interesting. Sometimes it even helped us plan day trips. Professionally though, my recommendations sometimes turned out to be not too welcome.

I've picked up bridge again -- it's a source both of elation and deflation. After ceramics last year, A.'s gotten interested in pottery now -- her soup bowls are now the subject of fierce contention at home. Also ... I've resumed writing a blog.

Is a Tata Jaguar any worse than Ford Jaguar?

After years of being unable to make a profit off Jaguar, Ford is trying to sell it. One of the interested buyers is Tata, a highly profitable Indian firm that runs several luxury brands including Taj hotels and Tetley Tea. They also make cars and trucks.

So where exactly is this fellow, a leading Jaguar dealer, coming from when he informs the Wall Street Journal:

"I don't believe the U.S. public is ready for ownership out of India" of a luxury-car brand such as Jaguar, Mr. Gorin said in an interview. "I believe it would severely throw a tremendous cast of doubt over the viability of the brand."

Later in the article, he tries to make it an equal opportunity offense, observing:

I don't mean to be negative towards anyone. I don't think we could have a Chinese-owned Jaguar either.

Oh, well. Okay then.

Draining the central United States

I navigated to the New Orleans News Ladder, the blog of someone who commented on my last post (about New Orleans). Regular readers know that I love maps, so this map on his blog immediately caught my eye.

The map link doesn't show up well in my response, so here it is.

One hears once in a while that the Mississippi-Missouri system drains the central United States, but the visual impact still startles.

Three views of New Orleans

The American Meteorological Society's annual meeting in 2008 is going to be in New Orleans. I'm running a AI competition at the meeting, so I'm going to be going. New Orleans was, of course, hit by Hurricane Katrina. Louisiana's dysfunctional state government let the situation get totally out of hand and FEMA's tepid response didn't help any. If the same disaster had hit North Carolina or Florida, there wouldn't have been anywhere near that amount of human suffering. And one thing that got lost in the aftermath was that the weather forecast for Katrina was about as good as they come. But I digress ... I was going to make a point about three views of New Orleans.

(1) The AMS meeting has an organized tour of the levees, the damage, etc. This makes me intensely uncomfortable -- the differentiating line between that and gawking at OPS ("other people's suffering") is not that clear to me. I'm definitely not going on that tour no matter how scientific the organizing committee makes it sound:

After having watched the television coverage of this horrific event, you likely have many curiosities about the magnitude of what the disaster has done and also many unanswered questions as you struggle to comprehend the aspects of human suffering ... You will gain a greater understanding of evacuation processes, levee systems, and the city's battle with coastal erosion ... The tour will drive past an actual levee that breached and see the resulting devastation that displaced hundreds of thousands of U.S. residents. The direct connection between America's disappearing coastal wetlands, oil and gas pipelines, levee protection, and hurricane destruction will be explained. After this tour, you will have a better understanding of events pre- and post-Katrina in the "rebirth of New Orleans."

(2) The latest issue of American Airlines' flight magazine -- I flipped through it having run out of other reading material while sitting 2 hours on the runway in Dallas -- has a short travel article on New Orleans. Their website is so disorganized that I can't find it online. The gist of the article seemed to be that even though a couple of hotels downtown were still closed, there were still some really posh hotels that the traveler could stay in and that New Orleans was as much a party city as ever. Not as awful as the AMS tour of broken levees, but the very act of leaving the elephant in the room unmentioned speaks for itself ...

(3) Today's USA today (the passenger beside me had a copy) had an article on New Orleans too. "Katrina's wrath lingers for New Orleans poor " blared the headline.

Acidic oceans

When the wife and I went to Australia in August, we visited the Great Barrier Reef. I joked to whoever would listen that we wanted to see the reef before it bleached out due to global warming. But at the back of my mind was the belief that even if the Great Barrier Reef disappeared, coral reefs themselves would not completely disappear. There are wonderful, unspoilt reefs now in Indonesia, and those reefs would probably move a couple hundred kilometers north, to places where the ocean temperature is currently a degree or so too cold.

This article in Science disabused me of that notion. Turns out that increasing carbon dioxide will do to the oceans what pollution did to the Great Lakes. The oceans will become acidic and this side-effect of carbon pollution will kill off the coral reefs. By the end of this century, there will be no coral reefs anywhere worth seeing.

We really do need a carbon tax.