drpaisley: (Default)
drpaisley ([personal profile] drpaisley) wrote2009-12-16 12:01 am

News

First, the good news: Joe Haldeman is named SFWA Grandmaster.

In other news, Tulsa, Oklahoma's most famous professional liar and fleecer of widows, orphans and the generally gullible, Oral Roberts, has died, some 25 years after he held himself hostage and demanded $8 million to keep God from killing him. The cash was not forthcoming, but Roberts was later found dumped by the side of the road in Sapulpa, none the worse for his hostage experience, save for an inability to properly judge the height of his kidnappers.

I was making buttons back then, and the "I Helped Oral Robert$ Die!" button was my best-seller, by far. I kept making a bunch, and they would immediately sell out. I was unable to keep the stock up enough to mail a batch to Bob Hise, who was living in Tulsa at the time, alas.

Bob did take Dragonet and I on a tour of the ORU campus, aka Six Flags Over Jesus, after OKon one year. It looked like someone had taken a bunch of architects, pumped them full of acid and locked them in separate rooms with some drafting paper and told them to draw a building. It's just a bizarre mix of styles and designs.

Oral is survived by his brother, Anal (thank you, Joe Bob Briggs). One less scumbag preying on the desperate. So many still around, alas.

[identity profile] tapestry01.livejournal.com 2009-12-16 04:56 pm (UTC)(link)
Oral Roberts had been on TV since before I was born, but I never even heard of him before I moved to Oklahoma. My first reaction to ORU was that it was the height of vanity for somebody to name a university after himself.

The other hospitals in town protested that Tulsa didn't need another hospital (mostly because they didn't need the competition) but Roberts got City of Faith built anyway; his reasoning was that it would serve his ministry from all over the world, and not compete with other Tulsa hospitals. Problem was, if somebody breaks their leg in Spokane they're not gonna go all the way to Tulsa to get it set. There's whole floors in City of Faith that have never been finished.

[identity profile] txtriffidranch.livejournal.com 2009-12-16 07:34 pm (UTC)(link)
Not to mention the fact that most insurance companies were loath to let their patients go all the way out there, especially for treatment of chronic issues, when they had access to much closer hospitals. It's one thing if City of Faith had specialists that justified the trip, but telling an insurance adjustor "Well, God told Oral to tell me to go there" doesn't work all that well.