Saturday Logan and I ventured downtown to experience Wizard World Comic Con Tulsa 2015. A celebration of popular culture they call it. I’d say it is more of a slice of popular culture focused more on Superhero movies and fringe television show as opposed to say in Oklahoma, football, deer hunting, tea party politics, and country music. That is okay though because Wizard World is lots of fun and a segment of Oklahoma that hardly ever shows itself is on display.
A big part of the fun is Cosplay where fans dress up as their favorite character. It could be from movies, television, shows, comic books, video games, anime or manga. Some of the costumes are quite elaborate. Check out this link to a Tulsa World photo gallery of the costumes worn at this event.
I know that your are wondering and no, Logan and I didn’t cosplay this year. Maybe next year.
I could have taken a lot more pictures but the venue reminds us that “Cosplay is not Permission.” In other words please ask permission before you take pictures. One could make a legal argument that they are in a public place and blah, blah, blah. We have too many people whining about their legal rights to do whatever, so I asked permission. Most of the time.
The Tulsa Ghostbusters were there in full force. I don’t know how many thousands of pics they posed for on Saturday.
And then these guys. Just so you know I didn’t hardly know who any of the characters were supposed to be besides the obvious like Batman, the minions, Spock and so on.
They had some vehicles there. Photos were free but if you wanted a photo of yourself in the jeep or whatever that is $20 or so. Hmmm, no.
Herbie the love bug was there.
We had a fun time. We met up with some of Logan’s friends and check out everything out two or three times and then went on our way.
There has been lots going on these days. I have not been a very good blogging friend I am sorry to say.
Heather, Logan, and Nana after the play.
Let me see, first up this week, Logan was in a play at school. He plays Baloo the bear in the play “Just so Mr. Kipling” a drama based on Kipling’s characters in The Jungle Book.
It is a a great role for Logan with his deep booming voice. He makes a great bear. The kids all did great. For a one act play it has pretty large cast and you can tell the kids and the director really worked hard on it. They competed in a regional competition a couple weeks ago and won first place. So next week the State Championship so we are all loading up and heading down to Mustang, Oklahoma where the competition is being held.
And then Wednesday night was Corporate Night at Tulsa’s Oktoberfest. We took some customers to the event to drink beer, do the chicken dance, and wear funny hats. I didn’t take too many pics. Not good when you are with customers. I did get a pic of our VP of Operations holding two full beer steins. I am not sharing the pic with you guys though. At least not yet. Maybe after I retire, or he retires, or something like that.
The beer was great. This is Lagunitas IPA. Yum, yum, is what I say.
And then Thursday night the choir’s at Logan’s school gave a concert. Everybody from the first graders on up. Again they did a great job. Again, all I got is fuzzy pics from my cell phone. Sorry.
So that is what we have been doing. Kind of bouncing between Culture, Debauchery, Divine Music, and then Popular Culture. I’m really messing the kid up.
It is that time of year. The days are getting shorter and now the sun is getting low on the later parts of rush hour. October is my favorite month for a bunch of reasons.
Saturday night I was writing a blog post and checking email from other bloggers and saw an email from National Geographic. I clicked on it and it was a news digest that talked about this that and the other and then I saw something that got my attention. An amateur photographer had talked NASA into giving him a bunch of DVD’s of scans of photographs taken during the Apollo Moon missions a long time ago. What!!!! Anyway the guy, Kipp Teague, along with his friend Eric Jones uploaded 13,000 images from the space program up to Flickr where they sit free for anybody to use for whatever they want (within reason). There are not copyrighted (after all, the US Citizens among us have already paid for them.) They are spectacular.
Time was, Space had a thrill, going to the moon was a spectacular vision.
Even now, I can’t believe we did it. Talk about an achievement. The follow on was kind of boring. The Space Shuttle to me was basically an expensive, hazardous, semitruck. Hauling up groceries and taking back garbage from the International Space Station. Apollo,Mercury, Gemini, those were adventures. These pictures bring it back. Most of them are kind of boring. The link I gave you will take you to instructions on how to go right to the good ones. These were mainly Hasselbad film cameras but also lots of other types.
I still can’t believe that we walked on the moon. Can you? I can’t believe that all these photos exist.
Saturday afternoon Heather, Logan, and I headed out north of Tulsa to the Tulsa Botanic Gardens. They were celebrating the opening of their brand spanking new Tandy Floral Terraces built on a hillside overlooking a small lake. They are beautiful especially with the large water features.
The plantings are new and need to fill out and they will fairly quickly but the terraces are a great place to visit. They have a wide asphalt pathway that covers the entire facility that appears to be accessible to powered wheelchairs.
We are very fortunate to have something like this in Tulsa.
And there is more to come. Work continues on the Children’s Gardens and they are scheduled to open in 2016.
As a bonus, the Tulsa Glass Blowing School was displaying and selling glass pumpkins and other decorative objects. They started out with over seven hundred pieces and by the time we showed up they were half gone. The pieces were gorgeous putting them out in the sun was about all the merchandising that needed to be done.
We found a couple we liked for ourselves and a gift.
They also had a multitude of scarecrows made by everyone from Girl Scout troops to Restaurants. These were some of the favorites.
Walter was my favorite. His bones were made out of musical instruments.
All in all a great day. It was nice checking up on the Botanic Gardens. It has been too long.
I am back in the Ashley Sisk’s Scavenger Hunt Sunday. Every Sunday she gives us prompts for the following Sunday so off we go finding photographs that match the prompts or as near as we can. So off we go.
1. Numbers
If you look closely you can see the number 4 from this piece mounted on Tulsa Fire Station Number 4 just south of downtown Tulsa.
2. Hot
Nothing like a great Hawaiian beer for a break during mowing the yard this past summer.
3. Pumpkin
On Saturday the family went to Tulsa’s Botannical Gardens. The Tulsa Glass Blowing School had almost a thousand glass pumpkins on sale. They were wonderful. I love stuff like this.
4. Quiet
Nothing much more quiet than the beautiful Thorncrown Chapel in Eureka Springs, Arkansas.
5. Full
How about a blurry pic of a full moon from Turkey Mountain overlooking south Tulsa during a night time trail run last winter. Have you ever tried running at night in the woods. It can be a lot of fun, especially when you are not falling or not falling too far behind the group.
Well, that is enough fun this week. See you next, maybe.
Morten Storm is a Dane who had troubles growing up. A rough and tumble household led to him being involved in gangs and drugs and lots of fights and even more chaos. As he tells it, he happened upon a book about the prophet Mohammed and liked what he found. He jumped into this with both feet and got involved in the growing Danish Muslim community and converted and then sent to Yemen for further study.
He tells about his growing radicalism and brings up many of the things that I’ve heard over the years but you hardly hear anything about in the USA. The resentment that many Muslims have over the US military being on Saudi Arabian soil is chief among them. Radical Muslims have a world view, according to Storm, that is totally alien to western views. Democracy for example is a big no no because that is man acting like Allah. Storm become more and more radicalized after he returns to Europe and then of course we have the attacks on the American Homeland on 9/11.
He is repulsed at first by the huge loss in innocent lives in direct contradiction of the Koran but is slowly brought about by the viewpoints of the radical mullahs who now say killing innocent people is God’s will. All during this time he is traveling throughout the Mideast and Europe meeting with various terrorists and raising money to support them. He has increasing doubts however about the killing of innocent civilians and then later has religious doubts about Islam, especially their concept of predestination and realizes that he can’t believe in a religion that predestined the murders of so many thousands of people.
He ends up offering his services to the Danish version of the CIA, the PET who get him involved him with the two British versions of the CIA (MI5 for internal affairs, and MI6 for overseas threats) and eventually the American CIA. His disclosures about these various agencies is hardly flattering to them. He talks about the briefings and debriefings done a very expensive hotels by these agencies and the debauchery of the PET in particular. The British agencies get a little break because they are very ethical and very reluctant to put innocent civilians in harms way.
The CIA he portrays as having very sophisticated technology but are very arrogant and also very willing to kill innocent people if necessary. He spent a lot of time with the CIA and feels that screwed him out of some major cash for tracking down some major bad guys but not paying him. Where he decides to leave his life as a double agent is when he is helping track down an American citizen, Anwar al-Awlaki, and is tipped by somebody else that he doesn’t want to be sitting by him ever because the Americans will fire off their hellfire missiles from drones or helicopters whenever they are sure of his exact position and don’t really care who else may be around at the time.
So he gets out and goes rogue, writes a book, and gets interviews on 60 Minutes. The book reads like a spy thriller but seems very believable. Storm has had an adventurous life meeting with many of the middle eastern bad guys and even finding a third wife for Anwar al-Awlaki on facebook and taking her to him in Yemen.
The book is a great read and I highly recommend it. Not only does he tell a heck of story about his life as a double agent but he also talks about the grievances that many Muslims have against the US and many of the countries in the Arab world that are seen as lackeys to America. Couter terrorism is a messy business. Our enemies are very smart and adaptable and are very committed. What struck me is the ease that terrorists can move around the world. They fight in Yemen, or Iraq, or Afghanistan, or Chechnya, and then go home and spend some time with the family in England or Denmark or wherever until they decide to go and fight somewhere else. It is also remarkable how dogged and determined the US and allied military and intelligence agencies are going after the bad guys.
This is a heck of read. I’ve been trying to figure out if Storm is legitimate or not. Who knows with a double agent. I hadn’t seen much in the way of people discrediting him besides the usual conspiracy lovers who point out things that don’t really matter. So sure he is gaming us a little bit but a lot of what he claims rings true.
Here is a 60 Minutes segment featuring Morten Storm and his claims.
Hey, I bought my book in the Kindle format on Amazon for about $3. I have put my Goodreads list on my Amazon wish list and check it regularly. Every now and then Amazon will cut the price of a book drastically for a short while. So I check my wish list regularly and grab books when they get cheap. The price for the book is back up around $10. I also download books for free from library but in these tea party crazed days, libraries here in Oklahoma have less and less money available.
The Martian is a science fiction space movie starring Matt Damon. He plays Mark Watney, a botanist on a NASA crew, exploring and studying Mars and when the crew has to leave suddenly because of a bad storm that threatens the space ship that has to take them to Mars. Visibility is poor and things turn south really quick and the leader of the crew has good reason to think that Watney is dead so they leave without him. Well guess what? He didn’t die and his efforts and determination to stay alive is what propels this movie forward.
He has to figure out how to let the folks at home know that he is alive, how to grow his own food supply and a whole bunch of other things plus deal with unexpected disasters in the meantime. I’m not going to give you a summary of the movie, you can find that at IMDB and you can check out the movie web site for more info. Check out the “goofs” section of the IMDB data. I always love those.
I will tell you that this is a great movie and I give it two thumbs up. There is some blood and gore at first, but hey I’m a seasoned Breaking Bad viewer so it didn’t bother me in the least. We have the gratuitous naked butt view of Matt Damon which didn’t do a thing for me. Other than that everybody keeps their clothes on. You know, Jessica Chastain is in the movie, why couldn’t we see her butt instead?
I’ll tell what is really amusing is reading the moans, groans, bitches, and complaints of experts who question the science of the movie. What a bunch of overeducated morons. It is a movie folks, not a science documentary! Get real.
The prompt today is Fall, cheater than I am I am going to use Falls. Last weekend I spent in the town of Idaho Falls. People in southeast Idaho sometimes just call the town “the Falls” kind of like people in Oklahoma call Oklahoma City, “the City” as in, “We went to the city last month.” Anyways Idaho Falls actually has a waterfall of the Snake River right downtown. So you are thinking I’ve gone way over six words. Well I hadn’t started yet you see. Anyways here I go.
Saturday Logan and I ventured downtown to experience Wizard World Comic Con Tulsa 2015. A celebration of popular culture they call it. I’d say it is more of a slice of popular culture focused more on Superhero movies and fringe television show as opposed to say in Oklahoma, football, deer hunting, tea party politics, and country music. That is okay though because Wizard World is lots of fun and a segment of Oklahoma that hardly ever shows itself is on display.
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