My problem with most people isn’t that they are hateful douchebags, but that they are so unimaginative and boring. I looked at someone’s blogger.com blog this morning, and blogger.com features a “Next Blog >” link at the top of the page. The link sends you to a random blog in the same genré as the…
Continue reading →Someone asked me the other day, “Don’t you feel kind of vulnerable when you hike in all those remote areas?” The answer, of course, is yes, but more significant is my feeling of self-reliance. I am trying to temp a photographer friend of mine into joining me for a hiking trip later this year, and…
Continue reading →Again I am going to talk about the long ago past and my mistakes. Live with it. I do. This is another story about hanging out with douchebags in high school. In the spring of 1981, my friends and I went to Oklahoma University for the day to tour the college and pre-enroll. In my…
Continue reading →Like most high school seniors, I got some senioritis. We didn’t drink or get high, but we stayed up late and stayed out late. We “cruised” a lot, meaning we drove in circles in the vicinity of Wayne’s Drive-Inn, trying to infuriate the “goat ropers” (our term for urban cowboys), who we regarded as inferior…
Continue reading →The veil of anonymity is something relatively new in human culture. The internet has brought it to everyday life, from tacky sexually-oriented chat rooms to comments on news articles to cyberstalking. The last 20 years have relieved us of the burden of accountability, such that in 1985, a letter to the editor might be signed,…
Continue reading →In the summer when I was 13, my dad was using television for instructional purposes at the Federal Aviation Administration’s management training school in Lawton, Oklahoma. Based on the campus at Cameron College, the school had a small tv studio where faculty could produce short films for classes to watch. Knowing that I was interested…
Continue reading →In the truest sense of egomania, I believe that the mere act of my discovering something on the internet means it is about me and I must respond to it. Everything is a challenge, not especially of the validity of my opinions (though it usually is), but more of my ability to be more clever…
Continue reading →In ancient Rome, a Forum “was a public square in a Roman municipium, or any civitas, reserved primarily for the vending of goods; i.e., a marketplace, along with the buildings used for shops and thestoas used for open stalls. Many fora were constructed at remote locations along a road by the magistrate responsible for the road, in which case…
Continue reading →I was young once, and as a youth I possessed a certain recklessness that is common to the young. I think we are all prone to this behavior, and I sometimes think it’s amazing we survive those years. In the summer of 1981, I hung out with some guys who drove fast, expensive cars. Friends…
Continue reading →It was in Centrahoma, Oklahoma, August 1992. It was my second time to visit the double-wide trailer in this tiny town, so tiny that its only road was unpaved. The first time was two years earlier, when a reporter named Judy and I came to investigate claims there was a poltergeist in the house, who…
Continue reading →From 1979 to 1993, Santa’s sleigh delivered large quantities of yellow-cake uranium to North Korea. Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer was originally created as a story of a drunk reindeer who ruined Christmas by crashing Santa’s sleigh into a gasoline tanker on Britain’s A4 motorway, but the concept didn’t float well with focus groups. If…
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I was a freshman at The University of Oklahoma. At the beginning of the spring semester, my roommate Jeff dropped out, so I had a dorm room to myself. I brought my enlarger from home, and managed to make my room dark enough that I could make prints at night. And it was all about…
Continue reading →There are those of us who spend their whole lives waxing rhapsodic about autumn. I once had a college professor at OU, a man named Clay Lewis, who told us about one time he was watching the marching band practice on an autumn day in October, causing him to burst into tears. This afternoon, while…
Continue reading →I thought it was really cool that when I Googled “neil diamond jonathan livingston seagull” I got this image…
Continue reading →As any YouTube user knows, the site watches what you watch, and makes recommendations based on the kinds of things you like to watch. In my case, YouTube steers me to a lot of aviation videos, some firearms videos, and a few World War 2 videos, but mostly to videos about the unending debate about…
Continue reading →Like a lot of writers, I tend to gravitate toward a word that I find interesting, and then use it ad nauseum. Lately I have been labeling anything I find to be slow moving or boring “ponderous,” particularly if it is attempting to express an intellectual construct, even unsuccessfully. This paragraph, for example, is ponderous….
Continue reading →Okay, I have been telling people at work all day about this, but no one seems to get how cool it is that logical paradoxes exist. Imagine standing in a room with a bow and arrow. At the other end of the room is a target. If you shoot the arrow, it will travel to…
Continue reading →“Governments tend not to solve problems, only to rearrange them.” ~Ronald Reagan I am against prayer in the schools, but not for the reason you might think. You might think that I oppose it because of my staunch atheism, but no. I am against prayer in the schools because I am against the idea of…
Continue reading →The United States is fighting two wars. The global economy is in tatters after three years of recession. The environment is endangered by humanity’s arrogance and short-sightedness. Drought cripples the south. Floods cripple the north. Unstoppable diseases kill millions. But what is in my Facebook news feed? XXX is at Krispy Creme. XXX made kitty…
Continue reading →I have no problem with people using money and property to get what they need; food, clothing, shelter, education, transportation. To some limited degree, I can even appreciate the value of entertainment. What I don’t appreciate, however, is a thirst we have come to know as conspicuous consumption. And I particularly dislike being pressured into…
Continue reading →In spite of the fact that at least a couple of close friends treated my opinions unforgivingly after I criticized Facebook, I am not inclined to remain silent on the on the subject. Facebook, and before it Myspace, and before it AOL, and before it the BBS network, are all just extensions of the shallowest…
Continue reading →Few would disagree that a really beautiful image of a mother and her newborn child, properly made, is one of the most significant and wonderful pictures in the lives of all involved. My grandfather, Richard Batten, after whom I am named, made such a photograph of my mother and me in the late summer of…
Continue reading →See, I made you look. “Oh, no, not another one of those ‘meaning of life’ blog entries.” I was cruising around WordPress.com the other day, which features a feed on the front page of all the recent entries made by WordPress bloggers. I was hoping to find something interesting, to dispel my growing belief that…
Continue reading →Don’t go bringin’ no agua to no Mexican brown dope dealers. They ain’t your concern.
Continue reading →In tenth grade I had an English teacher named Gil Hernandez, who many of my long-time readers might recognize as the teacher who got me started writing in my journal. Hernandez was big into the transcendental meditation scene in that era, the late 1970s, and the yearbook staff wrote two stories about him and meditation….
Continue reading →From Facebook: Howard XXX: lol. what happens when the right whines too much. (Picture of Barack Obama’s birth certificate) Alyssa XXX: Certificate of live birth is different than a birth certificate. Richard R. Barron: ?>>”Certificate of live birth is different than a birth certificate.”<< I don’t understand statements like that. My birth certificate says, “Standard…
Continue reading →After weeks of dryness and officially being classified in the “D3 – Drought Extreme” category by the U. S. Drought Monitor web site, the rain we have been missing has finally set in. Abby and I took Dorothy, our fe facto mother-in-law, to Kingston, Oklahoma yesterday to have lunch with Dorothy’s son Ralph and his…
Continue reading →Bad news for those of you who enjoy giving your loved ones Valentine’s Day gifts: we have seen the last Valentine’s Day. How could this be? Prophecy. According to the Nikon World calendar, the world will end December 31, 2011. “It’s been long known that this will be the end of it all,” said Lars…
Continue reading →While explaining to my coworkers today that a quarter pound of unicorn rump was on sale for just $5.95 at the local grocery, I decided that I would share these interesting facts about unicorns. Unicorn meat is among the leanest, healthiest meat available today. After eating unicorn meat, many people report farting stars, particularly if…
Continue reading →As an average, healthy adult, I suffer through my share of seasonal upper respiratory infections. We all have our nicknames for it: Mocus, Epizudic, The Crud, The Green Nose Packers, Sneezles, Angela’s Pismo Weekend, and so on. For me in years past, it starts with a sore throat, followed by a day or two of…
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