| Mayor Ousted: Bartlesville City Council votes to strip title from Ron ...
We are networked through work internationally and there are so many people from here to Indonesia, Kazakhstan, London--you name it--and back, who email us one disastrous recollection followed by another--the experiences they had living here. Well, good riddance to Bartlesville--we say--and hello to better paying jobs (with sign on bonuses of a years' salary and more) in a real city! We will not miss this town! But it has been nice knowing you, Brady, and we are all so appreciative of your efforts to bring the BCC and Bartlesville into the 21st century. Nice blog, too, and it is nice to be able to share the way that we feel somewhere where it is 'safe'. I'm sure you can understand that we have to be careful and very discrete. In fact, I am borrowing a friend of mine's computer to type this now.
Central Florida Winter Park owes its ambience to wealthy Midwesterners
The tour boat glides past lavish lakefront homes as the guide recites the names of notable past and present occupants: Walgreen as in drugstores, Sinclair as in oil, Horace Grant as in the Chicago Bulls and Orlando Magic. We might have been cruising past the genteel mansions of Lake Geneva, Wis., if it weren't for the Spanish moss hanging from the cypress trees and the alligators lurking in the reeds. The simple pontoon boat ride seemed typical of a Midwestern lake resort. If you think of Central Florida as all theme parks and tourist attractions with little history and culture, Winter Park will surprise you. Though only 30-40 minutes up I-4 from Walt Disney World, this city of 28,000 seems a world apart, a world with several Chicago connections. In the early 1900s wealthy Northerners came to Winter Park by train to escape the harsh winters back home, just as they escaped to Lake Geneva to flee the summer heat of Chicago.
Controversy over cutting of ‘Boondocks’ episodes
Sooner or later, any satirist who wins a Peabody Award for re-animating the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and having him denounce "Soul Plane" runs the risk of upsetting corporate America. That's one theory being floated this week as "The Boondocks" creator Aaron McGruder informs faithful viewers of his edgy, irreverent Adult Swim series that Cartoon Network has unexpectedly shortened the 'toon's second season from a planned 15-episode run to 13. Fifteen episodes were in fact produced but two, titled "The Huey Freeman Hunger Strike" and "The Ruckus Reality Show" aren't currently scheduled to air, allegedly due to controversial material targeting Black Entertainment Television executives. On his Myspace.com page, McGruder has posted the following message to fans: "Okay, so … maybe it's a 13-episode season." More cryptically, links to YouTube clips said to contain content from the episodes posted on McGruder's Myspace page have been mysteriously taken down (when users click on the links to the clips to view them, a "We're sorry, this video is no longer available" message pops up instead).
Great music, good cause
And he feels there will always be a place for folk. "Popular music revolves around stark, realistic images of society today," he said. "Folk music is like a painting. Folk music is like art." Having just released his 12th CD, "Blue Roads, Red Wine," May is perhaps one of the area's best-known folk and Celtic performers. He's a regular at Kells Irish Pub in Portland, as well as the Horse Brass Pub where the birthday party that spawned Winterfolk was held 20 years ago. Don Younger, owner of the Horse Brass Pub, said May continues to draw large crowds when performing at the pub. "It's his voice," Younger said. "He has one of the most beautiful voices. "He's got a reputation well beyond this place," Younger said. "He has fans who have followed him for 25 years and has new ones that have just found him.
Japan stocks fall over 2 pct, erasing week's gains
U.S. crude oil CLc1 jumped to an all-time high above $100 a barrel on Tuesday, with supply constraints helping to drive up the costs of other raw materials, though it had fallen below that level in Asian trade on Wednesday. 'Investors bid up the market earlier this week on expectations that U.S. stocks would do well once Wall Street returned from a holiday, but those hopes were betrayed,' said Yutaka Miura, chief technical analyst at Shinko Securities. 'Taking this along with the high oil prices and worries about the U.S. economy, investors decided it was a good time to lock in profits.' At 0429 GMT the benchmark Nikkei .N225 was down 2.4 percent at 13,430.06, its lowest since Feb 15. The broader TOPIX index was down 2.4 percent at 1,312.84.
Konica Minolta (4902.T: Quote, Profile, Research) plunged 7.3 percent to 1,365 yen after Credit Suisse cut its rating to 'neutral' from 'outperform' citing a weak office equipment market, competition in the LCD film market and the impact of a strong yen.
Bush Proposes Social Security System that Tilts Toward Poorest ...
Although still lacking details, tonight the President said he would favor a system that tilted Social Security benefit payments in the future toward the lowest income retirees. He suggested this might be the bottom 30 percent. (Below is the text of the speech and question and answer session with Social Security highlighted in yellow) "If you work hard and pay into Social Security your entire life, you will not retire into poverty," he said. According to the Associated Press, while Bush was still speaking White House officials handed out written material saying the type of change he had in mind could be accomplished with a "sliding scale benefit formula." That would mean lower payments for future retirees of middle and upper incomes than they are currently guaranteed a fact Bush himself did not mention in his 60-minute session with reporters.
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