Has Oklahoma lost an architectural treasure?

The unrepeatable experience that is Bruce Goff's Bavinger House appears to be gone now - whether forever or not, I do not know.

According to a story in The Oklahoman, the house recently sustained serious and extensive damage. For many years I read that the Bavingers were a private family and did not allow visitors. I did not know that the house had been open to the public in the last few years. Had I known this, I certainly would have made the pilgrimage.

I can't help but wonder about the effectiveness of Bob Bavinger's effort to promote the house as a tourist attraction. I have been on an email list for Frank Lloyd Wright's Price Tower for some time now. The first I ever heard about the Bavinger House being opened to the public was this morning when I read the story about the damage.

If the damage to the Bavinger House is irreparable, the loss will certainly be equal to that of Shin'enKan, the house Goff designed for Joe Price outside of Bartlesville, which was detroyed by fire in 1996.

Trailers

Muppets: I've been following the new Muppet movie trailers & the newest one, "Being Green" is classic, old-school Muppet Show subversiveness. Absolutely hilarious. But will the whole movie be this funny?

Moneyball: "Moneyball", the book, was about how Billy Beane re-invented the game of baseball. In "Moneyball", the movie, Brad-Pitt-as-Billy-Beane throws desks and chairs and seems to leave the thinking to Jonah Hill. What would be so wrong with a movie that shows one, single character as an integrated human being who can think and take action based on his own thinking? And actually be the good guy! Pass.

LET'S KILL . . . who?

Okay, I don't normally find these Hitler YouTube mashups amusing at all. In fact, I think all too many of them are just plain stupid.

BUT: as a Doctor Who fan (YAY MATT SMITH!!!!), I found myself literally ROFLMAO after seeing these new videos:

http://www.combom.co.uk/2011/06/more-doctor-who-and-hitler-mash-ups.html

DAMN YOU STEVEN MOFFAT! (Just kidding, Mr. Moffat! You're brilliant & I CAN'T WAIT for the second half of the season!

It starts when? September? AAAAAAAAAAGH!)

CAVEAT: If you're not that familiar with the show, I'm sure your response will more likely be WTF?

FOLLOW-UP @3:22PM: It's been confirmed that Matt Smith is returning for at least one more season as The Doctor!

As has Steven Moffat!

AND I would also like to throw in this tidbit - which I meant to post earlier: as far as I'm concerned, Russell T Davies' new official motto is:

"Twice the pathos!"

Love you RTD! You're brilliant!

Facebook

"Your account has been temporarily suspended

Suspicious activity has been detected on your Facebook account and it has been temporarily suspended as a security precaution. It is likely that your account was compromised as a result of entering your password on a website designed to look like Facebook. This type of attack is known as phishing."

I've lost track of how long it has been since I've been able to access my Facebook account. 3 weeks? 4? Facebook wants me to "confirm" my identity with some ridiculous "face recognition" type of test: I have to correctly identify a certain number of the faces in photographs of people on my "friends" list. The problem with that is I have 100 people on my "friends" list and I don't even know most of them by sight. The vast majority of them are people I have connected with on the Internet and have never met personally.

So Facebook expects me to be able to identify these people. What are they thinking? I guess I'm lucky I only have 100 "friends" on Facebook - imagine being one of those people with several hundred or even thousands of "friends". Again: what are the people at Facebook thinking?

And of course they are not about to give me an easy or obvious way to contact them about my account. Who knows if I'll ever find out what happened? Was it actually phishing or was it something else?

Yeah, I know: what do I expect for free?

This is why I stopped using MySpace years ago. Too many bugs kept it from coming anywhere near fulfilling the potential usefulness I thought it might be able to have for me. Is Facebook going the same way? Is it time to start looking for the next social network?

Seems that way to me.

Atlas Life

Here's a story in the Tulsa World about a building with a nifty name.

It's being converted into a Marriott hotel.

Love the sign! Looks like they plan to keep it.