Edited and updated from the version originally published on December 25, 2012

Merry Christmas to anyone who happens by BatesLine today.

My Christmas Eve was spent doing a little bit of last-minute shopping, including a visit to the Nut House for some pecans and to Persnickety Consignments in Catoosa for one of their hand-painted, glow-in-the-dark Christmas ornaments celebrating the Blue Whale and the Route 66 Centennial. I picked up some barbecue from Rib Crib just an hour before they closed at 5 (out of ribs, of course) for an early dinner.

My wife and I and our two local children attended our church's Christmas Eve Lessons and Carols candlelight service, which once again featured a Nativity-themed poetical homily written and recited by our pastor. I wore a green sweater over a red shirt for a family photo after the service, but it was only for appearance's sake; it was warm and muggy as we left the building, reminding us of our Christmas 2013 in Sarasota, Florida. I drove home through several midtown neighborhoods to look at lights. A favorite extravagant display on 30th Place east of Utica is missing this year, replaced by a For Sale sign, a sign with a sad story behind it.

Christmas day will be quiet, and just the four of us. We'll make phone calls to connect with far-flung family. With such a small group, we've decided on dinner out, although we'll make our traditional breakfast casserole for the morning.

At some point, we will listen to this year's Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols from King's College, Cambridge, and enjoy the solo chorister sing the opening verse of "Once in Royal David's City," the Old Testament prophecies of the Messiah, and the bidding prayer that opens the service.

While Lessons and Carols is an Anglican tradition, it is encouraging to see how it has escaped its cradle and found a home in Bible-believing churches of many different denominations.

As a Holland Hall high school student, I attended and sang in the annual service of Christmas lessons and carols at Trinity Episcopal Church, modeled after the annual Christmas Eve service from the chapel of King's College, Cambridge. My 8th grade year was the first year I was required to attend, and I expected to be bored. Instead, I was entranced. My last two years in high school, I was a member of the Concert Chorus and was privileged to join in the singing of Tomas Luis de Victoria's setting of O Magnum Mysterium, an ancient poem about the wonder that "animals should see the newborn Lord lying in a manger." As a senior, I was one of the 12 Madrigal Singers. The six ladies sang the plainsong setting of Hodie Christus Natus Est (Today Christ Is Born), repeating it as the students processed into their places. Then all 12 of us sang Peter J. Wilhousky's arrangement of Carol of the Bells, with the 3 basses landing on the final satisfying "Bom!" on that low G.

At the beginning of Trinity's service, after the processional, Father Ralph Urmson-Taylor, who served as Holland Hall's Lower School chaplain, would read the bidding prayer. Confessing Evangelical has it as I remember it. It's worth a moment of your time to ponder.

Beloved in Christ, be it this Christmastide our care and delight to hear again the message of the angels, and in heart and mind to go even unto Bethlehem and see this thing which is come to pass, and the Babe lying in a manger.

Therefore let us read and mark in Holy Scripture the tale of the loving purposes of God from the first days of our disobedience unto the glorious Redemption brought us by this Holy Child.

But first, let us pray for the needs of the whole world; for peace on earth and goodwill among all his people; for unity and brotherhood within the Church he came to build, and especially in this our diocese.

And because this of all things would rejoice his heart, let us remember, in his name, the poor and helpless, the cold, the hungry, and the oppressed; the sick and them that mourn, the lonely and the unloved, the aged and the little children; all those who know not the Lord Jesus, or who love him not, or who by sin have grieved his heart of love.

Lastly, let us remember before God all those who rejoice with us, but upon another shore, and in a greater light, that multitude which no man can number, whose hope was in the Word made flesh, and with whom in the Lord Jesus we are one forevermore.

These prayers and praises let us humbly offer up to the Throne of Heaven, in the words which Christ himself hath taught us: Our Father, which art in heaven...

The bidding prayer was written by Eric Milner-White, dean of the chapel of King's College, who introduced the Lessons and Carols service there on Christmas Eve 1918. Jeremy Summerly describes the prayer as "the greatest addition to the Church of England's liturgy since the Book of Common Prayer."

In some versions, the prayer for "all those who know not the Lord Jesus, or who love him not, or who by sin have grieved his heart of love" is dropped, perhaps because of political correctness and religious timidity, but they seem to have been restored in recent years. Who needs prayer more than those who reject the Way, the Truth, and the Life?

The phrase "upon another shore, and in a greater light" always gives me goosebumps as I think about friends and family who are no longer with us, but who are now free from pain and delighting in the presence of the Savior they loved so dearly in this life. As he wrote those words, Milner-White, who had served as an army chaplain in the Great War before his return to King's College, must have had in mind the 199 men of King's and the hundreds of thousands of his countrymen who never returned home from the trenches of Europe.

This year that number includes my father, who was Christmas cheer personified for our family and for many Tulsans for the last two decades. The staff at Philbrook Museum, where he held court every year since 2005 that they'd had a Santa, very kindly invited my sister and me and our families to one night of the Festival and presented us with Christmas ornaments honoring his memory. His successor at Philbrook is a fine gentleman and was a good friend and colleague to Dad, and it was nice to Dad's custom-built throne still in good use.

Added this year to the number of those who rejoice on another shore and in a greater light are several other men who were fathers in the faith: Brother Gerald E. Dyer, the pastor at First Baptist Church of Rolling Hills who baptized me in 1972 and who went on to serve pastorates in Baxter Springs, Kansas, and Miami, Oklahoma; Dr. Donald R. Vance, a world-renowned expert in Hebrew and Semitic languages, co-editor of Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensia: A Reader's Edition, a former professor at ORU and teacher at ACA, and a faithful friend; and Ray Rose, who was my boss at Burtek back in the late 1980s, and who set an example of living out his Christian faith both in and out of the workplace.

On the very same day that my dad left this life, my Aunt Gerry, my mother's youngest surviving sister, left us, too. Aunt Gerry was a voracious reader. When I was young she would lend me her favorite sci-fi novels, and she gave me albums that introduced me to Monty Python and Willie Nelson (and Willie Nelson introduced me to the Great American Songbook). She spent several years as a reporter and editor at small-town newspapers in southeastern Oklahoma and was a skilled grant writer.

Remembering those who have gone on before leads us to the final verses of the Epiphany hymn, "As with Gladness, Men of Old", which describes "another shore" as "the heavenly country bright":

Holy Jesus, every day
Keep us in the narrow way;
And, when earthly things are past,
Bring our ransomed souls at last
Where they need no star to guide,
Where no clouds Thy glory hide.

In the heavenly country bright,
Need they no created light;
Thou its Light, its Joy, its Crown,
Thou its Sun which goes not down;
There forever may we sing
Alleluias to our King!

The final verses of the processional hymn also speak to that blessed hope:

And our eyes at last shall see Him,
Through His own redeeming love,
For that Child so dear and gentle
Is our Lord in Heaven above;
And He leads His children on
To the place where He is gone.

Not in that poor lowly stable,
With the oxen standing by,
We shall see Him; but in Heaven,
Set at God's right Hand on high ;
When like stars His children crowned,
All in white shall wait around.

MORE:

"Once in Royal David's City," the processional hymn from King's College Lessons and Carols, was Christmas 2023 Hymn of the Week at Word and Song by Debra and Anthony Esolen.

This year's broadcast of the Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols from King's College Cambridge marked its 107th anniversary. You might be able listen to the service for the next four weeks on the BBC Sounds website, but this year, because of changes in BBC policy, you might need to use a VPN and a private browser tab and an account registered to a UK address to listen. A pre-recorded video of the service, called Carols from King's, is available internationally for download at a price of £8.33 (about $10 US).

You can view the booklet for the service and an article on the history of the service here. (Direct link to service booklet PDF. Direct link to history booklet PDF.)

The history of the Lessons and Carols service was presented in this 15-minute BBC program, Episode 8 of the series "A Cause for Caroling." Alas, it was not repeated this year, so it is not available through the BBC, but it is available through Audible and as an audio CD.) Edward White Benson, first Bishop of Truro, originated the service of Nine Lessons and Carols in 1880. It was published in 1884 and began to be used more widely. From the 2018 service booklet:

The 1918 service was, in fact, adapted from an order drawn up by E. W. Benson, later Archbishop of Canterbury, for use in the large wooden shed which then served as his cathedral in Truro at 10 p.m. on Christmas Eve, 1880.

A. C. Benson recalled: 'My father arranged from ancient sources a little service for Christmas Eve - nine carols and nine tiny lessons, which were read by various officers of the Church, beginning with a chorister, and ending, through the different grades, with the Bishop'. The idea had come from G. H. S. Walpole, later Bishop of Edinburgh.Very soon other churches adapted the service for their own use. In the immediate aftermath of the First World War, Milner-White decided that A Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols would be a more uplifting occasion at King's than Evensong on Christmas Eve. He used Benson's plan, but wrote the now-classic Bidding Prayer to set the tone at the beginning. Since then the spoken parts, which provide the backbone of the service, have only occasionally changed.

MORE: John Piper explains what Christmas is all about in 115 words:

Christmas means that a king has been born, conceived in the womb of a virgin. And this king will reign over an everlasting kingdom that will be made up of millions and millions of saved sinners. The reason that this everlasting, virgin-born king can reign over a kingdom of sinners is because he was born precisely to die. And he did die. He died in our place and bore our sin and provided our righteousness and took away the wrath of God and defeated the evil one so that anyone, anywhere, of any kind can turn from the treason of sin to the true king, and put their faith in him, and have everlasting joy.

STILL MORE:

Author William Federer, on the Eric Metaxas Show, explains the evidence that establishes December 25 as the date of Christ's birth.

At her blog, A Clerk of Oxford, Eleanor Parker has written a great many articles about the Anglo-Saxon commemoration of the Christian year. This Twitter thread and this blog entry will lead you to a series of articles on the "O Antiphons," the Latin poems of praise to Christ that are read at vespers over the week prior to Christmas day, each one naming a title of Christ reflecting a different aspect of His glory -- Wisdom, Lord, Root of Jesse, Key of David, Dayspring (Morning Star), King of Nations, and Emmanuel (God with us).

Her essay from 1st Sunday in Advent 2020 reflects on Advent, Christmas, and time, on 2020's lack of holidays, the impossibility of "pressing pause" on life, the origins of Christmas and claims of cultural appropriation, the emotional impact of the season. A worthwhile ramble on a gray day. It's all worth reading, but this passage stood out to me, and it cites that wonderful phrase from the bidding prayer that undoes me every year:

The British festival year used to involve numerous seasons and holidays when people could gather together, in extended families and in local communities; now for many people in that 90% it's almost all concentrated on Christmas, and that's a lot of pressure. Of course advertisers exploit that pressure for their own ends, so many of us have a vision in our heads of the 'perfect family Christmas' which may bear little or no relation to how we have actually experienced the season. (I'm sure the journalists are attacking the imaginary advertisers' Christmas more than anything they've seen in real life.)

It's typical of the modern Christmas, most of all in its focus on family and childhood, that it leads people to places of strong emotion, both good and bad. Whether your memories of childhood Christmas are happy or unhappy ones, when Christmas comes round there's no escaping them. Whatever your family is or isn't, or whatever you want it to be, this is the time when you are insistently pushed to think about it and to compare yourself to others. Any sense of loss or deficiency in the family is made worse by the contrast with images of other apparently perfect families, or by remembering past happiness, or imagining what could or should be. Grief is harder. Absences are more keenly felt. It's a season when one phrase or one note of a song can open floodgates of emotion, calling forth profound fears, griefs, and longings which in ordinary time we might manage to contain. Christmas used to be a season of ghost stories, and it's certainly a time when it's hard not to be haunted by memories - even happy memories, of 'those who rejoice with us, but on another shore and in a greater light'.

You can call that sentimental, or irrational, but it's very powerful all the same. And it's no coincidence - of course it isn't - that this is all intensified because it takes place at midwinter, when the days are very short and the nights very long; when the weather is cold and hostile; when light is lowest, and the shadows longest. There's a reason we call this season 'the dead of winter', with all the sterility and hopelessness that implies. That makes the Christmas brightness all the brighter, or the darkness all the darker - the lights and the warmth and the company all the more welcome, or their absence all the more painful.

It's a bleak and lonely and isolating time of year, at the best of times; and these aren't the best of times. How much more endless the empty evenings seem now in November than they did in April, now they begin at four o'clock in the afternoon! The 'it's just one day' people can go on saying that as much as they like, but this particular day, after nine months of isolation or separation from family, is going to be hard for a lot of people.

Just remember: If you didn't fulfill every Christmas tradition you wanted to honor, give every gift you wanted to give, sing every carol on or before December 25, there are still eleven days of Christmas remaining!

RELATED: Tom Holland writing in Unherd in December 2020 on The Myth of Pagan Christmas. Holland takes us back to the Christmas feast at the court of King Athelstan in Amesbury in 932, and looks back from there to the idea of measuring time from the birth of Christ:

Bede, more clearly than any Christian scholar before him, had recognised that there was only the one fixed point amid the great sweep of the aeons, only the single pivot. Drawing on calendrical tables compiled some two centuries earlier, he had fixed on the Incarnation, the entry of the divine into the womb of the Virgin Mary, as the moment on which all of history turned. Years, by Bede's reckoning, were properly measured according to whether they were before Christ or anno Domini: in the year of the Lord. The effect was to render the calendar itself as Christian. The great drama of Christ's incarnation and birth stood at the very centre of both the turning of the year and the passage of the millennia. The fact that pagans too had staged midwinter festivities presented no threat to this conceptualisation, but quite the opposite. Dimly, inadequately, gropingly, they had anticipated the supreme miracle: the coming into darkness of the true Light, by which every man who comes into the world is lit.

He concludes with this:

This year of all years [2020] -- with a clarity denied us in happier times -- it is possible to recognise in Christmas its fundamentally Christian character. The light shining in the darkness proclaimed by the festival is a very theological light, one that promises redemption from the miseries of a fallen world. In a time of pandemic, when the festive season is haunted by the shadows of sickness and bereavement, of loneliness and disappointment, of poverty and dread, the power of this theology, one that has fuelled the celebration of Christmas for century after century, becomes easier, perhaps, to recognise than in a time of prosperity. The similarities shared by the feast day of Christ's birth with other celebrations that, over the course of history, have been held in the dead of winter should not delude us into denying a truth so evident as to verge on the tautologous: Christmas is a thoroughly Christian festival.

Today, I stopped to do some Christmas shopping at the new Decopolis Tulsarama Station on Historic Route 66 at 5717 E. 11th St. The Decopolis Discovitorium has been open since 2020 at 1401 E. 11th St. in the Meadow Gold District, but Tulsarama just opened on November 22, 2025, a bit less than a year before U.S. Highway 66's centennial on November 11, 2026.

Tulsarama, named after Tulsa's 1957 celebration of Oklahoma's semi-centennial, is like a collection of little specialty shops in one location. The building was originally Creech's Cafe, but for most of its existence was McCollum's Restaurant, sitting just west of the Will Rogers Motor Hotel and amidst a mile of motels on what was then Tulsa's eastern outskirts. Just inside the door from the parking lot, you'll see displays with photos and text on the history of the building and the area, and even an old menu.

Every room is beautifully and imaginatively decorated by owner William Franklin, who is an accomplished painter of murals, portraits, and trompe l'oeil, with work installed around the globe.

Right along 11th Street is the bright and sunny Tulsarama ice cream parlor, serving a dozen hand-dipped flavors from Tulsa's Big Dipper Creamery. The booths are decorated with owner William Franklin's whimsical Tulsarama Gang comic strips, each one illustrating an aspect of Tulsa's history, and with artwork and articles from Oklahoma's 50th anniversary. 1957 was the high-water mark of Route 66 and the post-World War II great American road trip, when locally-owned small businesses dominated the two-lane roads that took Americans across the country.

In the corner of the ice cream parlor, there's a Tulsa Visitor Center, with free maps and brochures, as well as books for sale about Route 66, Oklahoma, and Tulsa. They've got the new Route 66: The First Hundred Years by Jim Ross and Shellee Graham.

The complex also encompasses FableRealm Bookstore, which has books, toys, and gifts related to popular fantasy fiction series.

Just beyond the bookstore, you reach William's Tulsey Town Art Gallery, with prints celebrating Art Deco and Tulsa history. There are prints of historic Oklahoma maps, of architect Paul Corrubia's evocative 1937 charcoal sketches of Tulsa landmarks, and of William Franklin's own paintings of Tulsa's architectural gems. There are plans to offer painting classes in this room early next year. You can also find handmade, leather-bound journals, and the pottery of Jezz Strutt, who offers some Tulsa and Route 66-themed items.

Decopolis, a combination gift shop and museum devoted to celebrating Tulsa's Art Deco heritage, first opened in a storefront in the parking garage at 6th and Boston in 2012. In 2016, the store moved a block north into the Thompson Building at 5th and Boston. The downtown location closed at the end of 2020, but Meadow Gold District location had opened in October of that same year and is still thriving today. The Discovitorium features dinosaur, sci-fi, and fantasy-related gifts, toys, and books. It includes a mini Tulsa Art Deco museum where you can pick up a free Tulsa Art Deco downtown walking tour map.

William's dream is to add a new and bigger Discovitorium and a full-fledged Tulsa Art Deco museum to the new Tulsarama complex. In a Facebook post from last week, he talks about the tourism impact of many individual small-business initiatives, but they need local support to succeed and grow:

[Tourism as an industry] is a new thing for Tulsa that I believe has huge promise and potential for growth. Go to the Meadow Gold District and check out the "Route 66 Giants" and the fun shops and restaurants that have sprung up there in just the last couple of years. This is just one, small part of what promises to be a whole new, vital industry which could bring fun, excitement, money and jobs, to Tulsa, to you.

There is a saying, You can make a big splash in two ways, throw in a big boulder, or throw in a lot of coordinated pebbles. All the little tourism related attractions and businesses along Route 66 in Tulsa, and in our neighboring towns, could make a wonderfully big, fun, neon colored splash!

BUT this is still a nascent enterprise and we are facing what looks to be a tougher year than normal. Right at the time when a lot of small Tourism related businesses on Route 66 in Tulsa have just started, or expanded. So we could use a little extra attention this week and next from the good people of Tulsa to help us out.

Our BIG dream? We would like to add a full fledged Museum, the DECOPOLIS Tulsa Art Deco Museum, a new bigger Decopolis Discovitorium and Mesmer Island Dino Adventure, to the same TulsaRama & FableRealm Books property. A wonderful new attraction for you to visit and enjoy! Scheels? Once we achieve our plans, we will leave them in the dust.

Over the last year, amidst exciting concept sketches and photos of construction progress, William shared the frustrations of the City of Tulsa permitting process, which slowed everything down and put hopes of opening for the Route 66 Centennial year in jeopardy. Individual entrepreneurship, individual owners each with their own quirky vision, is what built Route 66 and made it memorable, and yet city leaders focus their attention on top-down, government-funded "attractions" like the Cry Baby statue. People like William don't need government subsidies, they just need the city to make the permitting process as painless, predictable, and quick as possible. Redirecting weird statue money to improving government services would be a good start.

I hope you'll take time to visit Decopolis's two locations and the many other locally owned businesses along Tulsa's Route 66. Both stores are open 10-6 tomorrow, Christmas Eve, and remember, there are twelve days of Christmas, starting with Christmas Day, so you can keep shopping and giving gifts through Epiphany.

I tend to keep browser tabs around for a long time. I find an interesting story that I want to write about, but never get around to it. I'm going to try to get through a few in this entry, but will not let myself spend more than an hour. Here are a few recent stories on new laws passed this year by the Oklahoma legislature.

OK property owners can repurchase seized land after Nov. 1: This Fox23 story from October 28, 2025, reported on State Rep. Tom Gann's (R-Inola) bill to force the Oklahoma Transportation Commission (aka ODOT) to give the previous owners an opportunity to buy their land back if it is surplus to requirements. This was already being done if the previous owners still had a remnant of the land adjacent to the land that was taken; this bill requires that opportunity for a total taking as well. HB1103 was authored by Gann and sponsored by Sen. Ally Seifried in the Senate, and it passed by wide margins in both houses. (12:40)

Oklahoma leaders say behind-the-meter law protects ratepayers from data center costs: This is a News on 6 story from December 14, 2025, about an interview with State Rep. Paul Rosino and former State Rep. Jason Dunnington on an unidentified bill the story says passed in 2024:

"BTM basically says companies, data centers, if you want to come to Oklahoma and set up shop, then you pay for your own power," Dunnington said. "You build it yourself, you use your own power. That alone, the legislature looking out for the utility rate payers by passing that was massive, and it needs to get talked about more."

SB 480 actually is from the 2025 session, and it passed without opposition in both houses, with dozens of legislators signing on as co-sponsors. The new language doesn't appear to require large data centers from buying electricity from the existing public utilities, but it allows them to generate electricity on site, if they at least partially using natural gas. It exempts these private power-generating companies from being regulated by the Corporation Commission as public utilities. Here's a news story on a new Chickasha industrial park being developed under the new law. Previewing the bill before the session, the Oklahoma Electric Cooperative described SB 480 as "raising new challenges for [rural electric] cooperatives around infrastructure planning and peak demand."

There's some weird, interesting language that was deleted -- a special carveout for some company in Washington County and for generation of "green hydrogen." The Washington County language appears to date from 1971. ("Amended by Laws 1971, HB 1080, c. 26, § 1, emerg. eff. March 22, 1971; Amended by Laws 1971, HB 1257, c. 322, § 1, emerg. eff. June 24, 1971") The "green hydrogen" language was added by HB 4065 in 2024.

The same Oklahoma Electric Cooperative bulletin mentions HB 2752, which was to ban the use of eminent domain by private companies for renewable energy facilities (e.g. wind and solar farms) and to require a Certificate of Authority from the Corporation Commission before using eminent domain to extend high-voltage lines, using a process defined in HB 2756. Both bills passed overwhelmingly, but HB 2756 became law without the governor's signature.

(That's 58 minutes work, mainly spent looking up the actual bills -- easier if the news report mentions the bill number -- reading through them, and finding related stories.)

Is Oklahoma setting itself up to ruin farm land and waste tax dollars in pursuit of AI riches, only to end up with massive, unusable, empty buildings?

John Mecke, writing at Development Corporate, sees the same dynamics at work in AI infrastructure finance that led to the dot-com bubble and telecom crash right after the turn of the millennium.

The numbers are staggering. In a single week in late 2024, Alphabet announced a $40 billion plan for AI infrastructure, while Anthropic committed $50 billion for new data centers. An unprecedented gold rush is underway to build the physical backbone of the artificial intelligence revolution. Private equity firms, infrastructure funds, and sovereign wealth pools are pouring hundreds of billions into what they believe will be the defining infrastructure investment of the decade.

But as the investment mania accelerates, a critical question is being quietly asked in boardrooms across Wall Street and London: What is the exit strategy? For the private equity and infrastructure funds backing these colossal, multi-billion-dollar projects, the lack of a clear path to liquidity presents a risk that could undermine the entire boom--or worse, trigger a collapse reminiscent of the telecom crash of 2000-2001.

In other words, how are investors going to make money in the short run on investments that may take most of a decade to generate revenue?

Mecke offers and elaborates on four concerns:

1. The Great Mismatch: Short-Term Money Chasing a Long-Term Game

Data center infrastructure represents a long-duration, capital-intensive play that typically requires 10-15 years to generate optimal returns. Yet the capital flooding into the sector comes predominantly from funds with much shorter investment horizons....

The problem intensifies when you consider the construction timelines. CBRE research shows that power delivery delays and electrical infrastructure shortages mean new data centers now require 3-4 years from groundbreaking to operation. Add another 2-3 years for the facility to reach stable cash flow, and you're looking at 6-7 years before an investor sees meaningful returns--consuming most of the intended hold period before the asset is even fully operational.

Mecke points to AI cloud provider CoreWeave's lower-than-expected IPO valuation, debt burden, and burn rate as a cautionary tale.

2. The "Digital Ghost Town" Risk: How Today's Cutting-Edge Tech Becomes Tomorrow's Stranded Asset

Mecke recalls the massive fiber optic build-out of the 1990s, but internet traffic growth was far less than the projections that fueled half a trillion dollars of debt-leveraged investment. Tulsans will remember the resulting price collapse and corporate layoffs.

Improvements in compute efficiency, technological breakthroughs on the horizon, and the shift from compute-intensive AI model training to less demanding inference operations all point to deceleration in demand for processing, space, and power. "The risk of building what amounts to digital ghost towns--billions of dollars in concrete, steel, and silicon gathering dust--is not theoretical. It's the natural consequence of building infrastructure for a technology that's evolving faster than the construction timelines themselves."

RELATED: William Langdon writes that Oklahoma's AI-infrastructure strategy is centered on an obsolescent, copper-connected, GPU-centered, power- and water-hungry technology, while more efficient Tensor Processing Unit (TPU) technology is emerging:

That undermines the entire pitch behind Oklahoma's data-center subsidies: You don't need massive cheap water, cheap electricity, huge tax giveaways -- if your hardware is built on the latest technology.

It also means that if a data center built today with GPU farms gets converted (or partly reused) tomorrow for TPU-based infrastructure, much of the "infrastructure footprint" -- high voltage lines, oversized cooling, oversized water delivery -- becomes wasted. A white elephant.

3. Too Big to Sell: When Scale Becomes a Liability

For Mecke, this involves not the size of the facilities, but the valuation of the investment. When the original investors demand a return on investment, there are few potential buyers big enough to pay what the investors expect, and the end result may be the Big Data customers scooping up the infrastructure at bargain rates.

73% of projects under construction are already preleased, primarily to a small number of hyperscale customers (Microsoft, Google, Amazon, Meta).

This concentration means the market isn't liquid--it's locked. When it's time to sell, there are no alternative buyers beyond the hyperscalers themselves, who have every incentive to wait for distressed pricing rather than pay peak valuations.

4. The Flawed Escape Routes: Why Traditional Exits Don't Work

Mecke explores the possibility of IPOs and more creative financial strategies as possibilities to attract investors, but notes worrying protections for insiders that make this industry a bad deal for future investors:

Analysis of CoreWeave's IPO structure by Mostly Metrics reveals troubling details designed to protect insiders while exposing retail investors. Magnetar Capital's "Penny Warrant" allowed them to buy shares for $0.01 each--a price unavailable to public investors. Founders cashed out nearly $500 million pre-IPO, de-risking their positions while marketing the company to retail buyers at full price.

This pattern--insiders reducing exposure while retail bears downside risk--is classic bubble behavior.

Mecke goes on to list several warning signs: the massive amount of capacity in the construction pipeline or in the planning stages; long waits for grid connections and rising electric costs; the possibility of debt markets deciding enough is enough; and the question of how quickly AI capacity can be monetized by attracting customers still figuring out how to integrate AI into their businesses.

Each of the factors listed above were factors in the bursting of the telecom bubble. The fiber optic infrastructure "eventually found its purpose, enabling the streaming, cloud computing, and mobile revolution that followed. The fiber was there when demand finally caught up--just not in time to save the original investors."

The question isn't whether AI will transform computing--it almost certainly will. The question is whether the current infrastructure buildout is properly sized, timed, and financed to capture that value. History suggests that revolutionary technologies often create their greatest wealth in the second wave, after the first wave of investors has built too much, too fast, with too much debt.

As AI infrastructure investments scale into the tens of billions, the most important question may not be who is funding it, but who will be left holding the keys when the music stops.

Which takes us back to William Langdon's Substack essay. Politicians chasing these developments are offering discounted access to water and tax incentives, all in hopes of a small number of long-term jobs. Langdon calls on policymakers to ensure that the developers are responsible for the risks, not simply reaping the rewards:

Require infrastructure costs to be borne by developers -- not taxpayers or ratepayers. If you want to build a supercomputer campus, pay for the grid upgrades, water infrastructure, environmental mitigation, and long-term maintenance.

A place that seemed mysterious, mythical to me as a 10-year-old has been in the news lately. What was empty land back then (and still is, half a century later) may become a massive 10-square-mile master planned development with an adjacent data center.

It was 1974. I remember when I first saw it, and I was fascinated.

Our family lived in a little house in Rolling Hills, a subdivision in northwest Wagoner County, unincorporated at that time. Maps of Tulsa didn't show our neighborhood. City insets on road maps were sized for "Tulsa proper," the city limits prior to the massive 1966 annexation which tripled the city's land area and took Tulsa's eastern boundary to the Wagoner County line. A typical city map stopped at Garnett or 129th East Avenue. As a map nerd, I was frustrated that my neighborhood and its environs were treated by cartographers as terra incognita.

I was 10 when I got a copy of the 1974 edition of the Oklahoma state highway map. I probably picked it up at the Tulsa State Fair, along with a bagful of other brochures and bumper stickers to be found at the booths in the IPE Building. The Oklahoma Department of Highways (now ODOT) issued a state map every year, and there were all sorts of fascinating details that Rand McNally didn't show -- little towns, unincorporated communities, wildlife refuges, city limits of small cities, and Sandstone Creek ("World's First Upstream Flood Prevention Project"). On the cover was a photo of the Nellie Johnstone, Oklahoma's first commercial oil well; when we lived in Bartlesville we walked past the oil well replica often on our way to the swings at Johnstone Park.

The back of the 1974 Oklahoma map was themed "Highways to History" and filled with black-and-white photos of land runs, Indians, chuck wagons, and Will Rogers. There were inset maps for Oklahoma City and Tulsa, and this time the Tulsa map showed all of Tulsa, along with towns to the west and the east and the fence lines they'd established to defend against further Tulsa expansion. Our neighborhood was there! There was Catoosa, there were the old roads we took to get to the port and Owasso, along with the new port highway under construction. And there, on the east edge of the map, coming with a mile of our house, was a big, gray, blocky tornado, stretching from Apache to 66th Street south, from 201st East Ave east beyond the edge of the map labeled Fair Oaks. The Wagoner County map from around that time showed Fair Oaks stretching all the way to 313th East Avenue, a half-mile from the Verdigris River. Stretching 7 miles east to west and 8.5 miles north to south, Fair Oaks' land area was bigger than any other city on the map except Tulsa itself -- bigger than Broken Arrow, Sand Springs, and Sapulpa. According to the index on the other side, in the 1970 census, the massive municipality of Fair Oaks had a population of... 23. 23 residents over 15.2 square miles, possibly the least dense municipality in the USA.

Part of the area covered by Fair Oaks was familiar to us. We drove east on Highway 33 (Admiral Blvd) a few times a year to visit grandparents in Mountain Home, Arkansas. Families from our church had moved from Rolling Hills to build homes on bigger lots near a little store and gas station near Midway Road (257th East Ave) and Admiral (I remember it as Nuckolls' Store, but it was also Fugate's and Tramel's), and we'd go out to visit once in a while; that area wasn't in Fair Oaks, but it was surrounded by Fair Oaks. No one had heard of Fair Oaks. Despite the big footprint, Fair Oaks seemed to have no foothold in tangible reality.

Thanks to online map and newspaper archives, we can reconstruct the early story of Fair Oaks:

Older county highway maps (like this 1936 Wagoner County map) show mining sites roughly running north-south along Evans Road (225th East Ave, two miles east of the Tulsa County line). The Croweburg coal formation, illustrated in this 1982 Oklahoma Geological Survey map of potentially strippable coal beds in eastern Oklahoma, surfaces along a line from about Admiral and 241st East Avenue running south-southwest to 91st Street and 209th East Avenue.

This 1927 Wagoner County production map shows a significant amount of natural gas exploration in the area as well (along with the location of a number of long-lost communities and railroad spurs).

Aerial photographs going back to 1941 show the scars of coal mining, like this photo covering Pine to 21st Street, Evans Rd (225th East Ave) to Oak Grove Road (273rd East Ave). The long thin lakes visible throughout this area on satellite imagery are old coal strip mines that have filled with water.

This 1974 map of surface-mined coal lands shows thousands of acres in the Fair Oaks area disturbed and only a small portion near Catoosa partially or fully reclaimed.

Property ownership maps from 1936 (see also here) showed that much of the future Fair Oaks footprint in Wagoner County was owned by rancher L. S. Robson. Interestingly, the Robson name doesn't show up in newspaper clips about the town until 1999.

On Thursday, August 26, 1966, two new Wagoner County towns filed for incorporation: Oak Grove, a few acres around an existing community centered on a church, a store, and a cemetery at 51st Street and 273rd East Avenue (Oak Grove Road); and Fair Oaks, inaccurately described in news accounts as "6 miles east of the County Line on 71st Street." A 1972 survey showing the Fair Oaks town limits show the original townsite as a quarter-mile-wide L shape with the lower left corner at 11th and Oak Grove Road, about 222 acres. From what I recall of municipal incorporation law back then, you had to be at least so many miles (perhaps five) from an existing city limit in order to incorporate -- this was to discourage the creation of enclaves and the multiplication of municipal governments that would strangle the growth of existing cities and towns. But once you incorporated, you could annex land that would bring you near or up to the boundaries of other cities.

Protecting future mining from being regulated by an expansionist City of Tulsa would have been a strong reason to incorporate Fair Oaks, although none of the newspaper accounts I've read have mentioned coal mining at all. The timing is interesting: Tulsa's big annexation took effect March 25, 1966, and these new towns were created just five months later.

In 1968, City of Tulsa officials were planning for a third airport (after Tulsa International and Riverside), somewhere on the east side of the metro area, which was the direction of growth at that time. The Tulsa Airport Authority's consulting engineer identified five possible site, and in November 1968 recommended an 1,100 acre site in Wagoner County, roughly around 11th Street and 225th East Ave (Evans Rd), likely including land owned by the Robson family. TAA voted in December to accept the recommendation.

By the time the TAA met on February 4, 1969, it was known that Fair Oaks would soon be annexing a massive amount of land, including the TAA's preferred third-airport site. At that meeting, Cal Tinney offered the Tulsa Airport Authority nearly three square miles in Wagoner County for the third airport. Tinney's land was between 31st and 51st Street, County Line Road to 215th East Ave.

On February 8, 1969, the Fair Oaks town trustees approved Ordinance No. 1, expanding the town from 222 acres to over 15,000 acres, and extending west toward Tulsa, north into Rogers County, and south toward Broken Arrow. The Tulsa World story at the time inaccurately described the land as six miles west of the Will Rogers Turnpike entrance. The report stated:

With its growth, the town inherited a private trash pit near Oklahoma 33, a gasoline war raging along the same highway and varying numbers of unlicensed dogs running loose. The annexation proceeding took place at the ranch home of Mrs. Marie Steely, a widow. She and her brother-in-law, Ralph Steely, and a farmer neighbor, W. W. Repschlaeger, are the town's trustees. They passed a motion to annex in response to a petition signed by 15 property owners.

In the words of the town's attorney, Sam Bassman of Claremore, "Fair Oaks has as much right to annex property as any incorporated community in the state."

The report said that it was unknown what effect annexation into a different municipality would have on Tulsa's proposed airport plans. Fair Oaks could choose to ban airports or impose impossible regulations.

Tulsa taxpayers rendered the issue moot: A city bond issue proposal for $1,125,000 to purchase land for the third airport was one of 16 out of 18 city and county bond questions that were defeated in a September 9, 1969, election. Only 31.2% of voters supported the measure.

23 was the population of the expanded Fair Oaks in the 1970 census. By 1980, the population had grown to 384, and by the 1990 census had grown to 1,133, living in 382 households. According to the U. S. Census Bureau, the town's total area in 1990 (as it had been since 1969) was 15.2 sq. mi. -- 12.0 sq. mi. in Wagoner County and the remainder in Rogers County.

For all that land, and despite some highway frontage, Fair Oaks had no retail stores to generate sales tax and offered no municipal services.

While none of the news stories to this point have mentioned the Robson family, this June 1969 map showing land ownership around the Port of Catoosa and the McLellan-Kerr Navigation System shows that most of the land within the boundaries of Fair Oaks are owned by "Nick Robson, et al." Owners listed on the original townsite were L. W. Steely, Nick Robson et al., and Walter Repschlaeger, Jr.

Nick Robson's October 1999 obituary says, "Robson was a principal in the organization of the Konklin Volunteer Fire Department, the organization of Wagoner County Water District No. 3 and in the formation of the town of Fair Oaks, serving as the town's clerk." It also mentioned that the ranch had been established in the 1920s by his father, L. S. Robson. The "et al." may have been other Robson family members, such as Nick's sister Helen Robson Walton, wife of Walmart founder Sam Walton.

A March 1975 document posted on an anti-MPD-6 Facebook group shows Catoosa coal magnate Frank McNabb (namesake of the Catoosa High School stadium) leasing mineral rights for up to 10 years to a list of 14 Robsons and Waltons, including Nick Robson and Sam and Helen Walton. The lease covered 4 square miles, Admiral to 31st, Evans to Oneta Roads, and Admiral to 11th, Oneta Road to Midway Road.

It was a few months before Nick Robson's death, in May 1999, that the prospect of industrial development prompted the Robson family and City of Tulsa leaders to begin talking publicly about Tulsa annexing part of Fair Oaks. We will pick up the story there next time.

MORE:

The proposed Fair Oaks Master Planned Development (MPD-6) would transform 6,229 acres of undeveloped land in the Wagoner County portion of the City of Tulsa. This is separate from, but adjacent to, the controversial 339-acre Project Anthem data center south of 11th Street and just west of the Creek Turnpike. MPD-6, a proposed zoning change, was discussed by the Tulsa Metropolitan Area Planning Commission (TMAPC) at their November 5, 2025, meeting, but the applicant asked for a continuance to January 7, 2026. Stay tuned.

Plate 2 of Oklahoma Geological Survey map 33 shows the coal fields of Wagoner County in more detail. Click here, then enter "Geologic Map 33" in the search bar to see all five plates and the accompanying report, covering coal geology in Tulsa, Washington, and Wagoner Counties.

About "gasoline wars": Before the 1973 Arab oil crisis, service stations fought for customers by slashing the price of gas as a loss-leader. Repairs and oil changes were where the real money was to be made. But none of the stations along 33 were within the Fair Oaks town limits.

The filing period for the 2026 Oklahoma school board elections begins Monday, December 1, 2025, and ends Wednesday, December 3, 2025. Candidates file at the election board of the county which contains the district; for districts that extend into neighboring counties, candidates file in the county in which the school district headquarters is located. Across Oklahoma, every geographical K-12 (independent) school district, K-8 (elementary) school district, and technology center district has at least one seat up for election every year. Filing is open each day from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m.

The school primary election will be held on February 10, 2026, and the general election on April 7, 2026. If only two candidates file for an office, no primary will be held. If three or more candidates file, a primary will be held, and if one candidate receives more than 50% of ballots cast, that candidate is elected; otherwise, a general election will occur with the two candidates receiving the highest number of ballots in the primary.

Elementary school districts have three board members elected at-large and also elect one member every year to a three-year term. Technology Center districts have seven members with rotating seven-year terms. Independent school districts in Oklahoma (except for three) have five board members who serve five-year terms, and Ward 1 will be up for election this time around. Oklahoma City, Enid, and Tulsa districts each have seven election districts, each with a board member elected to a four-year term, and Oklahoma City also has a board chairman, elected by the entire OKCPS district to a four-year term.

I should point out for those new to our state that in Oklahoma school district government is completely disconnected from county or municipal government. Although school districts often take the name of the city or town where they're headquartered, their boundaries do not align with municipal boundaries, and the City of [Place] has no involvement in the management and operation of [Place] Public Schools.

In the Tulsa Technology Center district, the term of District 7 board member Dr. Jim Baker is expiring. District 7 covers the southernmost part of the Tulsa Tech district, including all of Liberty, Glenpool, and Bixby school districts, the bulk of the Jenks school district, and portions of Union and Broken Arrow districts.

This year, two Tulsa Public School board seats are up for election: District 4, held by conservative Republican E'Lena Ashley, and District 7, held by progressive Democrat Susan Lamkin, the current board president. In 2022, Ashley conducted a door-to-door, grassroots campaign to defeat the incumbent, while Lamkin prevailed in a high-dollar battle against former District Attorney Tim Harris, a conservative Republican. District 4 is the eastern part of the TPS district (basically anything between Pine and 31st Street east of Memorial), while District 7 is the southernmost strip (roughly south of 51st between the Arkansas River and Memorial).

In most years, the vast majority of school board seats draw only one candidate. That's not surprising when the filing period falls at the beginning of the Christmas season when our energy and attention is focused elsewhere. Even if there is an election, it typically draws very low turnout. The two-month-long campaign period features short days, cold temperatures, bad weather, and holidays, all of which hinder door-to-door campaigning and volunteer availability. BatesLine has long promoted the idea of holding municipal, school district, and county elections in the fall of odd-numbered years, with two-year terms for every school board seat. This creates a regular rhythm of election season, with statewide and federal elections alternating Novembers with local elections.

We won't know for sure who's running until the close of filing. In state elections, you could often get advance notice by seeing which candidates for a given race had filed a Statement of Organization form with the State Ethics Commission, required within 10 days of your campaign spending or receiving in excess of $1,000.

Soon, we'll be able to do that for school and municipal races as well. SB 890, authored by Sen. Julie Daniels and passed unanimously in both houses this past session, moves reporting for county, municipal, independent school district boards, and technology center boards to the State Ethics Commission. The changes in the law went into effect on November 1. (Daniels, a Republican, represents Senate District 39, covering Washington & Nowata Counties and northern Rogers County.)

That's good news for the public, as we'll no longer have to file an open records request with the school board clerk and pray for a timely response. Eventually, we'll be able to search for all reports on a given school board race on the web, with no gatekeeper. Rather than request filings from various county election boards, city and town clerks, and school district clerks, rather than having to decipher and digitize handwritten reports, we'll be able to search online through electronically filed reports for nearly every elected office in the state.

But not quite yet. The State Ethics Commission has been rolling out a desperately needed update to their online filing and search website, known as Guardian. Guardian 2.0 is in beta-test, and the Ethics Commission has prioritized the tools needed for campaign committees, lobbyists, and elected officials to file required reports, but the public search functions are not yet operational. The Ethics Commission website advises: "Campaign finance information remains available by request until public reporting tools are fully enabled [by emailing] ethics@ethics.ok.gov." Keep in mind that some school board candidates may have filed Statements of Organization for this election with the district clerk prior to the new law taking effect.

For now, we'll have to look to public announcements and the daily report from the election board to track who has filed for next year's school board races.

The National Archives has been digitizing its collections, and I came across these papers pertaining to the Tulsa Race Massacre aka Tulsa Race Riot while researching the previous item about the Tulsa HOLC "redlining" map.

DR-6.08 Oklahoma, Tulsa Co. Riot Reports and Statistics

This is a 218-page report issued at the end of 1921 compiled for the Tulsa County Chapter of the American Red Cross by Maurice Willows, who was brought from St. Louis to serve as Director of Disaster Relief in the wake of the massacre. Willows's grandson, KTUL anchorman Bob Hower, drew on these records to compile the book 1921 Tulsa Race Riot, Angels of Mercy. The report includes newspaper accounts of the disaster and its aftermath:

These clippings record the activities of the Public Welfare Board [original], the National Guard, the Police Department, the Mayor's Reconstruction Committee, the County Commissioners, the Ministerial Association, the Inter-racial Committee and, what is more important, reflect, editorially and otherwise, the consensus of public opinion on questions which will inevitably arise in the future for discussion.

On page 69 of the report, Willows discusses the attempt by the city commission to prevent rebuilding of homes by extending fire limits to encompass the burned Greenwood district. This was denied by the district court, allowing families to rebuild their homes.

Page 72 is an addendum describing a Christmas celebration at the Red Cross Relief Headquarters, where over 2000 Greenwood citizens gathered around a Christmas tree (donated by Charles Page) to sing Christmas carols and spirituals. 2700 Christmas packages were distributed, with candies, nuts, and oranges and also practical items, like pillows, clothing, and quilts.

The American Red Cross also compiled this Photo Album of the Tulsa Massacre and Aftermath. Many of the pages appear to have been water-damaged. The photo above shows the Disaster Relief Headquarters set up in the original Booker T. Washington High School building, which was not damaged in the riot.