Critical Thinking and Our Duty to the Truth by Richard R. Barron (Rewritten from a 2019 blog entry) Did we go to the moon? Do flu shots give you the flu? Was 9/11 an inside job? Are chemtrails poisoning us? I thought about these and questions like these as I reread and reshared a 2016…
Continue reading →
If you know me at all, you know that I love paper maps. For me, they have a soul of their own. I love paper road maps, paper trail maps, and, of course, paper sectional aeronautical charts. When I am feeling the itch to travel, hike, fly, or just explore the world, I dig out…
Continue reading →
Sticky note in my journal, January 5, 1995: “Lead with this at OMN!” … “Happiness is beneficial for the body, but it is grief the develops the powers of the mind.” ~Marcel Proust The night before this open mic event, I dreamed that there were both male and female hot dogs. “Buddhism is the one…
Continue reading →
This is the story we published about my experience speaking to Byng, Oklahoma School students about the day I covered the bombing in Oklahoma City. Journey of Hope visits Byng School The Oklahoma City National Memorial & Museum’s “Journey of Hope,” an effort to share the experience of the 1995 Alfred P. Murrah Building Federal…
Continue reading →
In some ways, nothing is more important than the weather. The weather dictates how we live, where we live, what we buy, what we use, what will probably be plentiful, and what might become scarce. In Ada, we got a refresher course on this important truism when, in the predawn hours Tuesday, March 4, 2025,…
Continue reading →
Waiting for the Miracle by Richard R. Barron I find myself on the front deck again, taking aim at the blue sky. If I shoot it down, it will fall all around me, and I can wrap myself up in its’ blueness. The sun would look on in black-and-white contempt, though only for a moment….
Continue reading →
Why does the truth even matter? (I originally wrote this as my column in December 2019, but it seems to be more important every time I look at it, so here it is again.) Did we go to the moon? Do flu shots give you the flu? Was 9/11 an inside job? Are chemtrails poisoning…
Continue reading →
At a big box retailer recently, I saw a display that held hundreds of boxes of earloop face masks. The price had been marked way down, so I assume they have a lot of this product and not many people are buying them. This is an interesting example of our society’s ability to forget a…
Continue reading →
My notes for the group, from my eclectic mountain of notebooks – ideas you can steal and run with! Create an image with words instead of an image with suffering. My blindness was wasted on you. I can’t make sense of my dreams, which already make perfect sense. Even after she left me, she said…
Continue reading →
___________________________ My Ten Commandments by Richard R. Barron This above all: to thine own self be true. Better to remain silents and be thought a fool than open your mouth and remove all doubt. Light and love, while you still have the chance It’s only 1/8000000000th about you. Stop thinking you have all the answers….
Continue reading →
My readers know me well enough to know that I am a very well-organized person, particularly when it comes to photography. Part of that is my devotion to keeping things neat (not, as some charmingly unwelcome critics have suggested, “OCD”), and part of it is my fairly sharp memory. I thought of this as I…
Continue reading →
I am parking this here so I can refer back to it.
Continue reading →
I have often said and written that putting pen to paper is one of the best ways to learn, one of the best ways to express yourself, and one of the best ways to keep track of our very complicated lives. You can see some clinical analysis at Psychiatrist.com. and Pens.com. I’ve been writing in…
Continue reading →
We’ve all been watching the Internet in the last few years. The disappointing trend has been accelerating away from the fun, promising Internet of the late 1990s and early 2000s, toward an almost Vaudevillian collection of ads, misleading and untrue facts and ideas, and grotesque incivility. For a little while after Twitter became X, I…
Continue reading →
“When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time.” ~Maya Angelou An important truth I have grudgingly learned over the years: most people are very happy to be very unhappy. I thought about this for a long time after someone I once liked decided to set me straight about what a terrible…
Continue reading →
Two of my long-time photographer friends and fellow Alan Parsons Project fans attended an AP² concert recently, so it got me thinking about what songs I loved and hated from this long-lived band. Most of the instrumentals are robotic and pointless: Hawkeye, Cloudbreak, Breakaway, Urbania, Pipeline, Nucleus, etc. On the other hand, instrumentals like Voyager…
Continue reading →
A couple of searches and shared memories resulted in finding these old photos of my late wife Abby. It started when my sister asked how her husband could take better pictures of her, and I reminded her of a time in 2007 when I posed, lit, and directed Abby for a portrait in my mom’s…
Continue reading →
“Richard, stop being infatuated with me!” ~Pam, October 1990 Today is the first anniversary of the death of Pam Hudspeth, a long-time friend, one-time girlfriend, and fellow journalist. She was just 58 when she died. A couple of nights ago, I had vivid dreams about her all night. Lucid dreamers know how much that can…
Continue reading →
Journal, April 1, 1994: I got checked out on the Piper PA28 Cherokee 160 this afternoon. I flew it just great, start to finish. The instructor said he “really enjoyed” flying with me. It wasn’t a perfect day. The wind was at 220 at 20, and it was quite squirrelly on final, all cross-controlled. It…
Continue reading →
What is sacred to you? The radio is playing chants. I curl beneath my electric blanket on the floor and listen, thinking about the day, my friends, my body and soul, my past and future, illusions and reality, and this very perfect moment. “He who yields to fear or pain or anger is a fugitive…
Continue reading →
Please note: this entry contains descriptions of violence and death that some readers might find upsetting. I read this at Open Mic Night Monday, October 7, 2024… There’s something about seeing freshly-dead, burned-up bodies that puts an air of frivolity around the day’s business. The lives of four people, on a business trip, were rather…
Continue reading →
Last year I mused about my second year of grieving the death of my wife Abby. I noted that it seemed harder, somehow, than that first year. You can read that entry here (link). Now, in the third year of grieving, it seems even harder. One of the cruelties of memory, at least in my…
Continue reading →
This fall has been cool and dry, so I’ve been taking every opportunity to work outside. One of my oddest chores has been efforts to remove chicken wire from the back yard fence. Abby had originally installed it to keep in her Chihuahua Gabby, but we reinforced it when we had goats. The problem with…
Continue reading →
Here is an overview of scanner frequencies in and around Ada, Oklahoma, which is in Pontotoc County. Some agencies use OKWIN, a growing Project 25 Phase 1 system, in some parts of Oklahoma, which can be monitored with a digital-capable scanner. Many other radio systems still use conventional, non-digital signals that can be monitored with…
Continue reading →
There is a clever saying that goes, “The best time to plant a tree is 20 years ago. The second best time to plant a tree is today.” That’s how I feel and act all the time. When I bought new tires for my Nissan Juke this week, it inspired me to hand-wash the car,…
Continue reading →
Updated November 2024 As some of you might know, I am a licensed amateur radio operator. My FCC-assigned call sign is kc5tfz, which is also the custom license tag on my Nissan Juke. I have several friends who are licensed “ham” radio operators. Almost universally, we use our amateur radio privileges less and less. I…
Continue reading →
Journal, July 1, 1994, my 31st birthday… To celebrate, I flew, of course. First, I flew the 150 alone to the practice area and did some spins. It had been a while, and guess what? Spins are still a huge rush. At 9 p.m., I flew two short field landings on runway 12, the second…
Continue reading →
Right after I got my pilot certificate in May 1993, I got checked out to rent airplanes at airports in my area. N2870Q, a Cessna 172, belonged to Dub. Dub and I were the first students to graduate from Phil’s class at the Ada airport. That was Saturday morning, May 1, 1993. Dub took his…
Continue reading →
Yesterday was “one of these days,” as in, “One of these days I’m going to get around to burning that brush pile.” My north brush pile began 13 months ago when a severe thunderstorm tore down some large limbs in two of my maple trees and Abby’s 100+year-old walnut. I had built this pile in…
Continue reading →
“The devil’s finest trick is to convince you that he does not exist.” ~Unknown “When small men begin to cast tall shadows, it means the sun is about to set.” ~Lin Yutang
Continue reading →