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I’m back in Austin, and I thought I would share a few photos and experiences from my trip. After spending the night in Norman, I decided to go to Crossroads Mall in OKC. A few months ago, I read of New York Knick Stephan Marbury’s partnership with retailer Steve and Barry’s to sell a $15 basketball shoe, which the baller would actually wear in NBA games. As I pulled up to the mall, the wellsites around the mall jumped out at me. It occurred to me that the donkey pumps weren’t an unusual sight when I lived in Oklahoma, but they stand out now. Then I thought, “Dude, you live in Texas.” Regardless, I was pretty amused by the wellsite in front of Macy’s.

Steve and Barry’s is like a downmarket Old Navy if you can imagine that. The store sold college-licensed and novelty t-shirts for three for $20. If you need to load up on OU (or for that matter, UT-Austin) apparel, this would be a good place to visit. I had forgotten to pack a winter coat, so I grabbed a warm polyester fleece sweater for five bucks.

After Christmas, I took a day trip up to Bartlesville, which is about an hour north of Tulsa. Bartlesville was until recently the headquarters of Phillips Petroleum and also home to Frank Lloyd Wright’s only skyscraper. The Price Tower was built in 1956 as the headquarters of the Price pipeline company, and it’s a strange 19-story building that rises over the prairie

Inside, the building is surprisingly small and awkward. Wright avoided the use of right angles in the building’s floorplans, and even the elevators use 30- and 60-degree angles. When I took the tour it was difficult to fit four adults into an elevator car, partially because of the strange shape. Wright originally designed the building to be used as charity housing in New York’s Lower East Side, but the plans were scotched during the Great Depression. Wright altered the plans in the 1950s for a mixed-use building in Bartlesville, which included the Price headquarters, corporate apartments, and a dress shop. Today, it serves as an upscale hotel and art center, but the high modernity of the building make it seem like little more than a conceptual building.

I’d recommend visiting the Price Tower if you’re in Tulsa for a few days. The drive up US75 is really quite enjoyable. As I watched the rolling hills of northeastern Oklahoma go by it, I thought of how in Texas that strip of highway would be covered by exurban tract housing, and how nice it is to actually see the landscape.

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Oklahoma football fans certainly haven’t forgotten the game against Oregon early this season. In the fourth quarter, officials on field blew a call on a fumble and gave possession of the ball to the Oregon Ducks, rather than the Sooners, which actually recovered the football. This led to an Oregon scoring drive which handed the Sooners their first loss of the season. There is now an instant-replay rule in top-tier college football, but, unlike the NFL, only a dedicated replay official is able to watch tape, and these officials have their hands tied in terms of what they can do. They can only overturn a call from the field if they have “indisputable video evidence,” that is, the call on field stands unless the official has access to an angle that shows the call was wrong.

I sure do feel bad for Gordon Riese, the Pac-10 official who served as the replay ref for that game. In the month after the game, he told the press that he couldn’t sleep or eat and had received death threats. (Boo, Sooner fans.) Now, in an article dated November 23 – over two months since the game – he tells The Daily Disappointment Oklahoman that he knew the Sooners should have taken possession of the ball, but the rules of the replay system kept him from making the correct call. He told The Oklahoman “I can’t let it go,” and I have to feel bad for a guy who’s obsessing over a football game months later.

Reading this news is still pretty frustrating after watching Oklahoma parked in the bottom of the rankings after the losses to Oregon and Texas. OU would probably be held in higher regard if it were a one-loss team. Still, after Texas lost to the Texas A&M Aggies yesterday, OU can play for the Big XII championship – and a top-tier bowl game – if it beats the flagging OSU Cowpokes. Playing a BCS bowl might be a nice end to a complicated season.

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Arnold Zwicky at Language Log was kind enough to post a follow-up to my post about how the University of Oklahoma is abbreviated “OU,” which reverses the order of the initials. He calls this phenomenon “covert premodification,” and his informants also identified the universities of Kansas and Colorado as schools engaging in covert premodification. Zwicky offers an explanation for the phenomenon.

I think I understand what happened here: the Universities of California, Kentucky, and Oregon are referred to as UC, UK, and UO, respectively (Oregon even gets the URL www.uo.edu; Kentucky is www.uky.edu, and the campuses of the University of California have their own URLs), so Colorado, Kansas, and Oklahoma distinguish themselves with the reverse ordering.

I’m not sure I entirely buy this explanation. I suspect these abbreviations date back to before widespread mass media, and, particularly, national football coverage. Considering the dearth of media and difficulty of cross-country travel, it seems unlikely that many people would confuse the universities of Oklahoma and Oregon. Also, I can identify two other schools that engage in covert premodification. The University of Tulsa is abbreviated “TU” (although its URI is utulsa.edu), and The University of Missouri-Columbia is known as “Mizzou” or “MU.” Since Colorado, Kansas, and Missouri all border Oklahoma, I wonder if this is a southern plains regionalism.

I’m not sure how useful it is to look at domain names for how schools are named, since the abbreviations almost certainly predate the internet. I’ve already mentioned that TU’s URI is “utulsa.edu,” and the uc.edu domain went to The University of Cincinnati, which has to be one of the lesser-known Us of C. It’s worth noting, also, that until around 1997 OU’s domain was uoknor.edu, for “University of OKlahoma at NORman.” (At the time, OU also had its Health Sciences Center in Oklahoma City and a branch of the med school in Tulsa.) My first web page back in 1995 was at http://www.ecn.uoknor.edu/~cmcconn01, which was darn near impossible to relate to people unfamiliar with the internet.

Since Zwicky suggests that Oklahoma uses “OU” to distinguish itself from Oregon, I thought I would relate a mildly amusing anectdote. When I was a computer magazine editior, I was out in California visiting the Irvine office. Coming back from lunch, my co-worker Rita, who was originally from Switzerland, asked me where I went to college. Preoccupied with driving in a strange place, I answered “OU.”
Rita asked, “Is that Oregon?”
“Oh, no, Oklahoma. I think Oregon uses ‘U of O’.”
“That’s confusing.”
“Yeah,” I admitted, “Actually, I had a girlfriend in college who went to Oregon for two years, then transferred to OU.”
Rita asked, “What did she call Oklahoma, then?”
“OU.”
“Then what did she call Oregon?”
“Eugene.”

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I think it’s a little funny that I met the leader of Norman’s hottest new indiepop sensation in Austin. I met Evangelicals leader Josh Jones at a happy hour for a local arts organization. He had just moved to Austin from Boston, where he attended the Berklee School of Music, so when he remarked on the number of Austin High football fans filling the bar, I explained, “Oh, high school football in this part of the country is serious business.” I was about to explain how rabid fans in Oklahoma and Texas are, when he said, “Oh, I know. I grew up in Norman, Oklahoma.” Anyway, he acknowledged that my high school, Jenks, owns Oklahoma football, but it was fun when we learned we knew many of the same people in Norman.

Anyway, the often-ridiculed indie-music site Pitchfork has an interview with Josh today, which discusses the Norman/Oklahoma City music scene and The Evangelicals latest record. In the interview, Josh offers readers a bit of advice I have to contest.

People should quit their jobs, move to Oklahoma, move in with 34 people, pay $100 a month in rent and start a band or start painting. That way you’ll feel like you have a purpose if you lose your mind, and you’ll have some fun on the way.

Um, no they shouldn’t. In my experience, you will lose your mind, but you’ll be bored and suffocated all the while. Josh clearly has had a different experience, finding success in Norman that he didn’t find in Austin, and I do think Norman is better now than it was in the late nineties. In particular, The Opolis provides Norman’s indie community with a place for shows and visibility that the suburb lacked when I lived there.

Update: While I’m linking to Pitchfork and not saying anything snarky about it, I’ll point to two dead-tree articles about the online music publication. The September issue of Wired focuses on changes in the music industry, and has a feature about Pitchfork. The Austin Chronicle also ran a piece a few weeks back about the origins of the site. Both articles discuss how the economics of Web publishing allow Pitchfork to make money writing about relatively obscure bands, while developing a reach that allows it to take bands like Broken Social Scene and The Arcade Fire to a more mainstream audience.

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I thought I’d follow up my post on Oklahoma flags with a link from Tom Coates’ del.icio.us bookmarks. Good Flag Bad Flag offers five principles for designing flags, and the first is “The flag should be so simple that a child can draw it from memory.” The current flag of Oklahoma clearly violates this principle with its feathers, crosses, olive branches, and symbols with obscure referents. (These symbols also violate the second rule.) Speaking from personal experience, this is a difficult flag for a child to draw. I’ve always thought the lettering “Oklahoma” at the bottom of the flag was superfluous, and it also violates the fourth rule, “no lettering or seals.” I suppose the original state flag violates this rule for having the “46″ in the center of the star, but it doesn’t seem as redundant as using the name of the state. The fifth rule is “be distinctive or be related,” and I think that the old Oklahoma flag trumps the current flag. The red field alludes to red flags used in the US labor movement, as well as socialist movements around the world, while the symbols in the current flag make little sense to anyone, and a blue field is used by 20 other states. Based on these recommendations, I think Oklahomans should take pride in their socialist history and revert back to the origclusioninal flag design.

As a final note, the site likes the Colorado state flag, which Coates found to be the worst, but it makes no mention of translating flag designs into running shorts.

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Huh, I didn’t realize until I read today’s “Doonesbury” comic strip that I share the same hometown as Mike Doonesbury – Tulsa, Oklahoma. According to this FAQ, Garry Trudeau’s choice of the city had little conscious cultural significance, explaining, “The selection of Tulsa, mentioned in the strip’s debut, was the first of thousands of occasions on which the creator went with the first thing that popped into his head.” After I tracked down the first strip, I realized that I had almost certainly read the comic, but the fact that Mike was from Tulsa wouldn’t have registered, since at the time I would have been a teenager living in Tulsa. I doubt I would have put the computer humor in the context of 1970 America, either.

Tulsa’s a funny choice of hometowns for Mike because as long as I can remember (which, for newspaper comics, is the Reagan administration) the major daily in Tulsa, The Tulsa World has buried “Doonesbury” deep in the classifed section, while other, less political strips like “Mallard Fillmore” run on the comics page in section C. Readers presumably complained that the strip rotted the minds of Tulsa’s youth. I remember being quite an avid reader of newspaper comics as a youth, and, once I finished “Bloom County” on the comics page, digging through the classifieds to find “Doonesbury.” Berke Breathed’s tales of cats and penguins probably rotted my mind more than “Doonesbury,” but it’s still an interesting memory of resisting newspaper design.

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I’m always a little dismayed when back-to-school season starts up in mid-July – it seems a month and a half is more than ample time to be shopping for folders and hand sanitizer. The New York Times is in the back-to-school spirit, as well, with a special section about colleges and college life today.

Two stories mention my alma mater, The University of Oklahoma, arguing that it’s an overlooked hotbed of academic excellence. One story, titled “Redrawing the College Map” discusses how elite institutions have become so competitive that many bright students are turning to second-tier institutions. It quotes Mark A. Longenecker, who I guess is an education policy researcher. “The University of Oklahoma is a classic example,” he says. “Many students never used to consider it. Now it has the largest share of National Merit Scholars in the country.” Ugh, I really do think the National Merit issue is a canard. OU awards National Merit Scholars such generous scholarships that students of modest means can’t really afford to go elsewhere. (As a freshman, I got a few thousand dollars in cash after paying for tuition, books, and housing.) While the school has the most National Merit Scholars per capita (I think rival UT-Austin has the largest absolute number) most of the students attend on OU’s nearly open admissions policy. The other story notes that OU has an 82 percent acceptance rate. My experience at OU was that while there were many very bright students, classes were geared toward slightly above-average students. I and many of my peers were bored and unchallenged in classes, and campus life had little to offer beyond football and church. The National Merit statistic is used to mask an tedious and conservative environment.

I attended OU nearly a decade ago, and perhaps things are less dreary. For example, there were no venues for indie rock bands when I attended, and now there is The Opolis, which is owned by members of The Starlight Mints. And perhaps classes have gotten more interesting, but OU needs to develop a better strategy for attracting top students and raising its profile than simply handing money to good test-takers.

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