My friend Tracy Nicole Holman passed away recently after a lengthy illness. She was young and beautiful and I was always glad to see her. The last thing she posted to social media was, “Eating a piece of candy found in the jeans that had a run through the washer…. I’ll live, right??!!” I am…
Continue reading →Recently, social media, particularly Facebook, has devolved from its customary shallow, vapid self into a sewer of fake news, angry lies, and complaining. As a young friend of mine commented recently, “I hate how political it all is.” Here, then, is a list of things I want to stop doing on Facebook… Getting involved in…
Continue reading →I am aware that my last few entries have been about our new puppy, Hawken, and that my readers might have heard enough for a while. “Evelyn slapped Raymond on the back with a laugh. ‘You must be starved, old friend. Come into my apartments, and we’ll suffer through a deep breakfast of pure sunlight.’”…
Continue reading →or “You Still Look the Same” As a result of my giant office cleanout project, I have posted on social media a number of photos of Adans (people from Ada, Oklahoma, for you out-of-towners) and their neighbors who I photographed in the 1990s and know in the twentyteens. Some of them look very familiar, but…
Continue reading →With rain in the forecast and nice evenings, I spent lots of time outdoors the last two weekends, rebuilding the roof of the doghouse, cleaning out the pen where the chicken coop lives, moving bricks and boards, re-attaching loose siding, weed whacking, cutting down dead trees, limb lopping, and of course, mowing. Abby and I…
Continue reading →I was walking to my car in a darkened area recently when I was approached by a largely-built white teenager in a hoody, carrying a skateboard. “Hey, can you give me a ride to the Oxford Square Apartments?” To anyone with any common sense, this seems like an overture to no good, and I was…
Continue reading →For much of human history, bread was regarded as, and called, “the staff of life.” This is because grains used to make bread – wheat, barley, rye, and many more – have been easy to grow, easy to store, and easy to use since mankind matured from hunter-gatherers to agrarians 12,000 years ago. For most of…
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I know, I know. Everyone complains on social media when they get sick. Boring. And I am sick, so why am I boring you with it? I had a head cold, a classic rhinovirus, before Christmas. I knew exactly what it was at the time. There were a couple of unpleasant days, but with rest and…
Continue reading →Did You Know? Few viewers of the insanely popular NBC sitcom F•R•I•E•N•D•S realize that the show was based on the combined philosophies of Emmanuel Kant, René Descarte, and Edmund Husserl, reflected primarily in the lyrics to the intro song, which states, “I’ll be, therefore you.”
Continue reading →Until a couple of days ago, it’s been unseasonably warm here in our corner of Oklahoma. It’s been so warm, in fact, that two of my plum trees have lost their minds and blossomed, presumably “thinking” it’s springtime. That’s not all that’s delusional. Many of my friends and I are still in dismay over politics,…
Continue reading →“America is Already Great” Today is election day. I have remained mostly silent on this subject until now, but I no longer see a need to do so. The fact that Donald Trump is a presidential candidate at all is bordering on the obscene. He is a selfish, womanizing, amoral douchebag, and obviously so. He…
Continue reading →Years ago I called out a friend about something she was doing that I felt was stupid: she was paying a neighbor to cut her grass while simultaneously jogging on her treadmill. This hurt her feelings, but in my defense, I wasn’t calling her stupid. I understand, though, that she might have felt attacked or belittled…
Continue reading →We have all dealt with the insincerity, shallowness, and selfishness of people around us. Often this manifests as false faces, people who pretend to like or appreciate you but behind your back gossip about you. This situation is particularly egregious when we have behaved respectfully and positively about these people, and even gone to bat…
Continue reading →Updated in 2022 to include… “…who were just there to be dicks,” Colin Speir, Trainwreck Woodstock ’99 I nodded my head when I heard this quote as I was watching the Netflix series recently, because I remember in the 1990s there were several instances of young people going out of their ways just to be…
Continue reading →Much of the sanctimonious preaching I do on my teaching blog is meant to emphasize the idea that artistic substance, not shallow devotion to technology, is the right direction to lead our creative energies. I preach that you can’t buy mastery, you have to earn it. I thought of this core concept as I began to…
Continue reading →Some of my younger readers might not understand what exactly a “mix tape” is. Essentially, prior to the MP3 era and organizing those items using playlists, and before CDs were easy to rip to MP3s and to clone, many of us shared our music by copying CDs, and before that, phonograph albums, onto cassette tapes….
Continue reading →Many music fans know that the band Chicago was originally known as Chicago Transit Authority, but the real CTA sued the band, forcing them to pick the laconic moniker Chicago. What fans might night realize is this was neither the first nor the last example of this type of problem. Other occasions of legal action…
Continue reading →As my readers know, my duties as a news photographer include covering area school activities, from the first grueling two-a-day football practices in early August to the proud and nervous graduations in May. Each year I seem to get to know the kids a little better and get a little more involved in their lives….
Continue reading →A long-ago friend of mine once described my job as a news photographer as “glamorous.” Like all jobs that involve elements of chance, risk, and adventure, it is true that mine can be a bit glamorous at time. Last night was one of those times: covering a shooting and subsequent manhunt not far from where…
Continue reading →There’s a scene in the movie Contact… Palmer Joss: Did you love your father? Ellie Arroway: What? Palmer Joss: Your dad. Did you love him? Ellie Arroway: Yes, very much. Palmer Joss: Prove it. “Take that, scientatheists!” ~screenwriters James V. Hart and Michael Goldenberg What we the shallow audience is supposed to expect, and receive, is Arroway’s dumbfounded silence….
Continue reading →She said, “Let’s have a party.” She said, “We’ll sing and dance.” She said to come as you are. So I came in my pants. Let’s party. Let’s have a party. The party starts here. I’ll try to share these in chronological order. I am with “Skip” at a party at our friend Jeff’s house…
Continue reading →This is a point-counterpoint rant, first about how amazingly sweet my wife Abby is, then about the inanity of corporate America. Abby and I were sharing a quiet moment in the living room one day last week. She was reading her Kindle and I was reading a photography web site on my iPad, when I…
Continue reading →[stextbox id=”warning” caption=”Now You Know”]The Ladies Auxiliary of the Ku Klux Klan is known as the Ku Klux Klit.[/stextbox]
Continue reading →Squawk List for Early 2016 “Headlines” we see on social media in 2016: my complaint is that they aren’t headlines at all. They are bottom-feeding click bate, and contributing to a long, ugly slide for society. They usually start with, “You won’t believe” or “No one could cope with” or “By the end of this…
Continue reading →Two years ago my wife Abby and I replaced our aging DVD player with a new BluRay unit, and that unit came with a free month of Netflix. For those not in the know, the current iteration of Netflix is quite different than its original scheme. In the beginning, Netflix sent a subscriber up to…
Continue reading →I recently removed someone from my Facebook friends list because I saw he called the President “a piece of human excrement.” I find comments like that fundamentally disrespectful and arrogant, and they are not something I will tolerate. I’m not the only one; I’ve read a number of columns over the years expressing this same dismay and…
Continue reading →Giant Muh readers recall that I celebrated my 52nd birthday yesterday. Readers will have to reach far deeper into their memories to recall that two years ago Abby and I bought a Nissan Juke, which I have since decided is my all-time favorite car. Someone recently asked me to summarize why, and I explained to…
Continue reading →I had an unusually busy Tuesday, and while I was driving from assignment to assignment, I listened to music. Through a quirk in the way my iPod (Abby’s old iPhone 3) interface’s with my Nissan Juke’s stereo system, it forgets that I want to shuffle songs and defaults to alphabetical order. At one point this…
Continue reading →From the song ‘Wounded’ by Third Eye Blind”… Back down the bully to the back of the bus because it’s time for them to be afraid of us… The subject of this story won’t see it, because I am about to “unfriend” her on Facebook. My guess is that she won’t notice. We’ll caller her “Marie.”…
Continue reading →“We’re all just one phone call from our knees.” ~Mat Kearney “We’re all just one trade away from humility, Bud.” ~Wall Street When I was younger, during less happy periods in my life, sometimes people would try to encourage me with the maxim, “At least you have your health.” Having been healthy all my life,…
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