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By Richard, March 10, 2010 8:53 am

The Roff Tigers hoist their first gold basketball in more than six decades Saturday night, March 6, at the State Fair Arena in Oklahoma City

For sports and photography fans, you might be aware that we are at the tail end of basketball season. Saturday night, the Roff Tigers won their first basketball championship in more than 60 years, in the newly-remodeled Oklahoma State Fairgrounds Arena, also known as The Big House. The Tigers were pitted against perennial class A arch rival, the Red Oak Eagles, from whom Roff took two consecutive baseball titles last fall and last spring. It was an incredibly intense game, and was an absolute pleasure to work under the new, improved lights in The Big House.

A day earlier, Friday, the Konawa Lady Tigers beat Savanna in the area championship game in McAlester, also in a nail-biter. They play in the class 2A state tournament starting tomorrow at The Big House, and I will be there.

Update: The Konawa Lady Tigers lost their bid for the state championship Thursday night, March 11, against Snyder. My basketball season, and theirs, is over.

The Konawa Lady Tigers celebrate a 3-point victory against Savanna at the Expo Center in McAlester Friday night, March 5

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By Richard, March 4, 2010 1:39 pm

This morning I added an Eisenhower High School classmate to my list of Facebook friends, a beautiful 1980 graduate named Shereé Neal who shared Mrs. Dishman’s writing class

Image of me with my journals; when Shereé knew me, I was writing in just the second one

with Michael, Anna and me. I learned from her profile that she likes to ride Harley Davidson motorcycles (as does my wife), and that she has been married to the same guy for 30 years. Two thumbs up for Shereé.

She surfed around on my Facebook pages for a bit, made some comments, then posted this on my wall: “Richard, you were, without a doubt, the most fascinating person who ever graduated from good ole EHS. Good to hear from you again!”

Wow, Shereé, thanks so much. But it can’t be true! I mean, come on! What about that guy who could eat eight Whoppers in one sitting?

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By Richard, February 28, 2010 1:39 pm

My wife Abby often sees things plainly that I tend to over-analyze. She was looking at some of our photo galleries this morning and came across my 2006 Jornada del Muerto images from the Great Gallery at Canyonlands National Park. This iconic collection of ancestral pictographs in Horseshoe Canyon shows mysterious human-like figures that have been variously described as tribal elders, gods, or even aliens. As Abby looked at them this morning, she told me, “Maybe these are people in burial shrouds, and the drawings show them ascending into the sky.”

As usual, Abby is brilliant.

The iconic figures of Canyonlands' Great Gallery

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By Richard, February 25, 2010 1:04 pm

…by Justin Lofton.

Goat Party drawn by my co-worker Justin Lofton during a staff meeting in which I mentioned that my goats had a party after I gave them some celery

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By Richard, February 23, 2010 2:50 pm

My diastemic countenance, June 2008

A co-worker was headed out the door a bit ago to get her teeth cleaned. I asked her if she flossed, and she told me she didn’t because it made her gums bleed. I explained that the reason they bleed in the first place is gingivitis, caused most frequently but failure to floss, and that if she would just “get over the hump” and floss until they stopped bleeding, they would never bleed again and her mouth would be a lot healthier. To this I added two important dental corollaries:

1. You only need to floss the teeth you want to keep.
2. Be true to your teeth, or your teeth will be false to you.

Another conversation led to discussion of braces, and my own diastema, a space between my upper central incisors. When I was a teenager, my orthodontist tried unsuccessfully to fix mine, but in the end it worked out fine, since Abby has long since forbade me from getting rid of it, citing its overpowering sexiness.

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By Richard, February 17, 2010 10:33 am

From the Ada Evening News (my newspaper): Marissa Long, Ada Evening News Ad-visor, received a surprise marriage proposal from David Morriss Friday morning. Morriss, a Pickett-Center firefighter and paramedic for Murray County, arrived at the Ada Evening News by Pickett-Center ladder truck with lights flashing and sirens blaring. Accompanying Morriss were co-workers in a second ladder truck. Firefighters, dressed in full gear, entered the building and escorted Long outside where Morriss was waiting with a bouquet of roses and a diamond engagement ring. The couple has not set a date for the wedding.

Morris proposes to Long

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By Richard, February 15, 2010 4:45 pm

The late Jeff Glenn and Allen Biehl on "The Swing," Idlewild, New Mexico, June 1981

Here are some important discoveries my friends and I made when we were younger, probably because we were among the few teens we knew who didn’t drink. In the present climate, however, I would not recommend any of these activities, some of which might be regarded as threats to national security.

• If you hang out the t-top of a Camaro late at night and hold on to a shopping cart, you can get it going really fast. For some reason, it’s hysterically funny to watch a shopping cart race down the road at 40 miles per hour after you let it go.
• A college ID card can, in some circumstances, be used to open the outer doors of a dormitory elevator, even if the elevator car is on a different floor. If you open it when the car is one floor below you, you can ride on top of it. It is a myth that you will be crushed when the car goes to the top, at least on the elevators I rode.
• If you open the outer elevator door from the eleventh floor while the car is on the twelfth floor, you can throw cool stuff down the elevator shaft, like tv sets and bean-bag chairs.
• If you are stranded in the west Texas panhandle late at night after a double blowout, shooting railroad tracks with a .22 survival rifle makes a ricochet sound just like in the movies.
• If you don’t secure the cargo in the bed of your pickup properly, it can cause double blowouts in the middle of the night in the west Texas panhandle.
  

  Electronics "experimenter" Chris Slaybaugh

• You can replace the overhead light in your dorm room with a chandelier, assuming your parents are throwing out an old chandelier.
• An empty Kodak Rapid Fixer 2.5-gallon cubitainer filled with boiling hot water makes a cool explosion when tossed off the second-story landing at the top of stairs in some high schools. Caveat: only on Saturdays when the only people at the school are yearbook staffers.
• 13 phones in a dormitory room are very loud when they all ring at once.
• Police are offended when the passenger in the back seat of your buddy’s car shouts “OINK!” at them at the top of his lungs.
• Construction workers are equally offended when they believe (even erroneously) that you have shot a gun at them. It will anger them farther if you are teenagers wearing three-piece suits.
  

  Robert Edison Stinson in his notorious "hanging chair"

• If you get a running start, you can slide all the way across a frozen golf course pond on your butt. It may ruin your ski jacket, however.
• If your 15-year-old buddy crashes his grandfather’s “borrowed” car into a light pole, you can ditch it in the country. Sheriff’s deputies apparently can’t tell real hot-wiring from pretend hot-wiring.
• Photographers tend to get upset if you replace their camera gear with pictures of their camera gear.
• If you are on a homemade tree swing that goes out over a canyon, you can leap off of the swing at the apex into pine trees. The swing, however, won’t come back for you.
• An antenna is not strong enough to keep you from falling off your buddy’s car as he goes around a corner. You may break arms or legs.
• You can take the big capacitors out of old tv sets and charge them up, then play “shock catch.”
• A legless armchair can be hung from drain pipes in the basement apartments of certain rooming houses.

I’ll have more later, assuming I am not in jail.

The so-called "Money Shot," 1982; there are a lot of things deeply, inherently wrong with this photo, but one thing is right: the "R" above my head is my first initial

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By Richard, February 14, 2010 5:04 pm

Abby's new crystal pendant

Abby and I are staying in this Valentine’s Day.

Mitchell went to church, followed by hanging out with a friend, followed by evening church, which is his Sunday routine.

Abby and I made breakfast together and chewed up a few chores, but for the most part, we are just relaxing. I gifted her with chrysanthemums, which we both liked better than roses, since she can plant them in the spring. I also gave her a unique crystal pendant, which she is wearing today, and planning to wear tomorrow.

Also for Abby, a live plant, chrysanthemums

For much of the morning it snowed yet again. This is easily the snowiest winter either of us can remember here. It was really beautiful.

The view from our front porch at about ten this morning

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By Richard, February 11, 2010 7:43 pm

Your brilliant host

Someone at my office today casually announced that “blogging is passe.” Of course, I beg to differ, in some cases. The truth is that overall, blogging was dead before it started, since it was shallow, annoying, incomplete and uncreative in the first place. So yes, bad blogging is passe.

If we are to believe in following trends, are we also to believe that blogging has been replaced by Twitter and Facebook? Instead of reading paragraphs of blogging, we read single sentences of updates. Or we read illiterate sentence fragments. Quite honestly, those endeavors are the shallowest, silliest efforts on the internet. They were passe on the day they were created, and get burdened with more boredom each day.

It is my hope that this blog is none of those vituperatives. I try to make it challenging, subtle, complex, intriguing. I try to keep it visually interesting. And most of all, I try to keep it honest.

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By Richard, February 11, 2010 2:34 pm

In 2005, David Martin decided to write a poem every day for 100 days. I told him that I would put an image with his poem each day, whether it was one I shot, or simply one on which I was working. 100 days later, we were done, and I originally posted it to web pages. Recently I wanted to revive this project, so I moved it to this blog. The dates of each post correctly correspond to the dates on which the poems were written. The image attached to each of David’s poems is a chronological coincidence.

To see the poems and photos, start here.

David Martin c. 1994.

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By Richard, February 8, 2010 1:29 pm

For as much snow as the United States has seen this winter and as frustrated with it as everyone has been, I still regard this as the way winter should be. For two days it has rained cold on us, with the popping of raindrops on the ground outside our bedroom window. Then today, as forecast, it turned to snow. I stepped outside and made this image, and I think the snow is beautiful.

View of fencepost in our front yard in brief, heavy snowfall this morning

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By Richard, February 4, 2010 4:51 pm

I've been saving this picture for just the right blog entry, and this is it!

I just got off the phone with an old friend who wishes to remain anonymous. We’ll call her “Steph G.” No, that’s too obvious. How about “S. Gibson”? Yes, that’s better.

Anyway, she’s got the Facebook monkey on her back and wants to quit and return to blogging. She’s very good at blogging, and she told me today that she feels happy when she blogs instead of waiting around for comments on those “stupid Facebook status updates.” I couldn’t agree with her more. At one point I had quit Facebook all together when another friend told me they had changed it. So I re-activated my account to find that nothing had changed, and like MySpace, which I ditched last year, Facebook is like going to a party with 195 of the shallowest people you know.

So, “S”, here is your impetus. Get off the Facebook horse, get on your blog, and copy and paste us your favorite song lyrics! Go, “S”, go!

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By Richard, January 29, 2010 10:57 pm

James and Judy Taff share a candid moment at the 2008 Shoffner family reunion (Photo by Abby S. M. Barron)

Abby, Mitchell, the dogs and I are home tonight. We spent last night in the dark, and despite the propane wall heaters in our bathrooms, it was just too cold for Abby, so tonight we got a motel room. By 8:30 tonight, though, Dorothy called to say that the power was restored, so we came home. I checked phone messages, and received some unhappy news. Abby’s uncle James Taff died two days ago after a short battle with cancer.

James and his wife Judy Taff have been hosts to the excellent Shoffner family reunion for years. They own an 80-acre patch of woods east of Duncan, Oklahoma, with a pond, a network of trails, and a large metal garage barn, making it perfect for what turns out every year to be a large, happy gathering.

In the last two or three years, James took a genuine liking to me. We played pool and cards for hours on end at recent reunions, and always had a great time.

In the barn, above the coffee machines, handwritten on one of the wall beams, is a simple message that represents James, Judy, and the whole goodness that they are. The laconic message is, “Justice – Mercy – Humility.”

A simple, respectable creed adorns the Taff's garage barn

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By Richard, January 29, 2010 8:46 am

As you may have heard read, Oklahoma is in the midst of a winter storm, and much of that is in the form of ice. In Byng, we got quite a bit more ice than was forecast, up to 3/4 of an inch. One result of this is that we are among thousands of customers in the area without electricity.

We were reasonably comfortable last night, since we have propane wall furnaces in each bathroom, but since Abby is so sensitive to the cold, we might check into a motel tonight if the situation remains the same. Abby and I are both at work today.

Ice on power lines in Ada this morning; except for intermittent interruptions, we have electricity downtown