Death Magnetic is Coming


Metallica is close to releasing their next album. “Death Magnetic” available tomorrow wherever better music is sold. They have their own XM channel now, “Mandatory Metallica” channel 51.

Sweetie absolutely hates Metallica, SuperPizzaBoy, my little rocker cannnot stand them either. They obviously have better taste in music than I do.

Some people read romance novels, others read Tom Clancy novels (I like him!), some like Doris Day movies. I like Metallica and others of the their kind (Korn, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Megadeath, Bride, among others.) I love the frenetic guitar playing, the big sound, the vocals. I know that makes me real shallow, but so be it.

My favorite album of theirs was their last, “St. Anger.” Their lead singer James Hetfield went to rehab halfway through it. The whole project was put off until he came back. They put out a dvd of them rehearsing the songs with, with the cd. I only watched it once. I have to wait until I’m alone in the house before I can play it.

I’ve come to find out that your so called “true” Metallica fans hate Saint Anger. It was really my introduction to them. I got it right after we found out that SuperPizzaBoy might have autism. The song “Invisible Kid’ is, in my mind, about SPB, and other kids who our local school districts would just as soon go away.

They also put out a documentary with the same name, “Saint Anger”. It was very painful to watch. Lots of bickering and fighting. It struck me how inflated and self important these guys are except for the bass player, Robert Trujillo who looks overcome with joy when he is playing. The documentary caused a momentary disillusionment of mine with the song “Invisible Kid”. They taped a session of the band flopped out on sofas trying to write the lyrics to Invisible Kid. They picked the words mainly because of their rhyming value. I didn’t see a whole lot of soul searching going on. I finally decided that the song has meaning to me.

Anyway, I’m buying Death Magnetic the minute I can. I’m playing it in my car so if you want a ride, you will have to put up with it. I’m putting it on my ipod. You have your brain candy and I have mine.

They are coming to town in November. My employer is a presenting sponsor. I can get tickets before they go on sale to the general public. Anybody want to go? Sweetie won’t go with me, and I’m not sure that they are Cub Scout friendly.

Hurricane Tracker

Here in Tulsa we don’t worry too much about Hurricanes. They are more of a curiosity than anything else unless they are monstrously disastrous like Katrina. If you have ever lived on the coast though you understand the anxiety among residents when a hurricane enters the Gulf of Mexico. The anxiety is something you can see as well as feel. What should we do? What is going to happen? Do we go now? What will happen if we wait.

There are some who say, “We are going to have a hurricane party!” or, “Its not that big a deal, we are to just ride it out.”

These are people who have never been through a hurricane. I’ve never been through a hurricane either. I did sit through the remnants of hurricane Alicia, which was fairly weak as hurricanes go, that went through Galveston and Houston in the early 80’s. I lived 90 miles from the Gulf, 55 miles north of downtown Houston. So I stayed in my house, so did everybody else as there was no evacuation in my area.

If I had it to do it over again, I’d go to Omaha. The wind was horrendous. The trees in the neighborhood were bent over parallel to the ground. Many of them landed on houses and blocked streets. I don’t get too worried about weather in general but I found that day to be very distressing. The wind roared for hours and then it got calm and quiet and then the wind picked up again and roared for several more hours. I have never heard anything like it before or since. I could only guess what it was like on the coast. My house didn’t get damaged. Some of my neighbors damage from trees on their house or cars. It wasn’t bad. Some people were without power for several days. The cleanup wasn’t as bad as what Tulsa had from last winter’s ice storm.

Anyway, people in hurricane country are always looking for good hurricane trackers. Convenience stores pass out tracking maps. People plot them and try to guess themselves where it is going to land.

The internet has made it a lot simpler. This is the best storm tracker that I’ve seen.

Football Season is here again

See you in the Spring Sweetie! Bye Bye son! The Dallas Cowboys have started another season. This time by trouncing the Cleveland Browns.

Other sports are just to fill in time between football seasons. College Football is for College Kids. Other professional teams are merely opponents for Dallas. Other teams are measured only by their ability to play against the Cowboys. If they beat Dallas, then they are a good team. If they lose, well that is to be expected.

I never ask anybody if they are a Cowboy fan. If they are I’ll find out soon enough. If they are not, they would just be embarrassed.

Life will be a lot simpler the next few months. You can tell by looking at me on Monday how Sunday went.

I guess that I could be a college football fan if the school I went to, the University of New Mexico was any good. When they have a winning season they act like they won the national championship. I’ve lived over 30 years in Texas and Oklahoma and UNM’s teams just cannot compete against the worst from either state. I enjoy watching the Sooners and am pleased when they do well, but it doesn’t affect me personally one way or the other if they lose.

So, those that know me will just have to put up with me for a few weeks and then I’ll get back to normal.

Geocaching – Why I Place Caches

I have a problem with geocaching. The problem is that SuperPizzaBoy and I have found almost all of the ones in Tulsa. Geocaching is lots of fun when you first start, you find out what are the fun caches and then you go get them. Fun caches are the large easy to find ones in the Woods. Tulsa has lots of woods. It is fun for the whole family. You find those it becomes less fun for families.

So the next move is placing caches. That is fun also. What makes placing them fun is what people say about them. If they like it and say so, it can really make my day. I put a lot of thought and effort into mine and when finders appreciate it and say so I love it.

SPB and I put a cache in some woods right off northeast downtown. It is in one of the oldest areas of Tulsa and near where the Creek, Osage, and Cherokee Nations met way before Oklahoma statehood. It is called “Country Club” in honor of the nearby Tulsa Country Club.

I got an email today from a finder named “Stoneposse” that said:

“Downtown for the opening of the BOK Center so we decided to grab a few caches and waymarks.This is what geocaching is suppose to be, a hide somewhere you may never find on your own! This is one of the best caches in quite a while! Interesting history! We could only imagine what it was like while we were there but it was great! The view of Tulsa was a BIG plus! Great cache! TFTC TNLNSL
We saw the Brady Mansion was for sale so we googled it and it has some very interesting history.”

note: “TFTC” means “Thanks for the Cache”, “TNLNSL” means “Took nothing, left nothing, signed log.”

His post made my day. I put a lot f work in the cache and found a “crease” if you will in Tulsa. A piece of woods right off downtown that was apparently long forgotten but used to be part of one f the first subdivisionsIf I like a cache, I always try to say that in my post. So many caches are very ordinary and uninspired.

I have other examples but the basic message is. If somebody does something that makes you happy, let them know it.

Eagles Concert

Saturday night Sweetie and I left SuperPizzaBoy with Brandy the baby sitter and we went downtown to see the Eagles at the new BOK Center downtown.

The new Arena is very shiny and nice. A big city type facility here in Tulsa.

The Eagles played a fantastic concert. They played over 3 hours including a short break. They are looking a little old but so is their audience. They really sang well and gave Tulsa their best effort. They came back twice for encores. Their voices are still great and their musicianship playing the music was great.

They played a bunch of their old stuff and some of their new stuff. I don’t know their new stuff but Sweetie and I will probably buy their new album.

I have even forgiven them for bringing Joe Walsh into the band a long time ago. I even liked the song “Hotel California” tonight for the first time ever. I have hated that song for literally 30 years, so this is a big step for me.

I give the concert a solid 4 stars out of four. I strongly recommend seeing them when they come back to town in November.

The picture below is their set. The man in the foreground is my friend Tom. I’ve known Tom a long time. He and his wife and myself marshalled the tee box at the 17th hole during the PGA Tournament at Southern Hills last summer.


Mail Order Bride

Two rednecks were looking at a Sears catalog and admiring the models.
One says to the other, ‘Have you seen the beautiful girls in this catalog?’
The second one replies, ‘Yes, they are very beautiful. And look at the price!’
The first one says, with wide eyes, ‘Wow, they aren’t very expensive. At this price, I’m buying one.’
The second one smiles and pats him on the back. ‘Good idea! Order one and if she’s as beautiful as she is in the catalog, I will get one too.’
Three weeks later, the youngest redneck asks his friend, ‘Did you ever receive the girl you ordered from the Sears catalog?’
The second redneck replies, ‘No, but it shouldn’t be long now. I got her clothes yesterday!’

Holiday at the Zoo

SuperPizzaBoy had his friend Q for a sleepover last night. They played video games, ate hamburgers, and ended up with two games of Chess using the Harry Potter pieces. Results one game to Q and a draw.

This morning after Sweetie made them four pieces of cinnamon toast each we decided to go to the Zoo.

The Zoo was a zoo so to speak.

Of course the kids had to have a treat.

We checked out the penguins. Sweetie said that they look like they expect something to happen. I thought about it and she was right. But when I thought about it some more, it seems to me that all penguins have that expectant look.

On leaving the zoo we had to get the earth turning.

Then we left.

AT-6 Crash Site

The family is down in Antlers, OK, queen city of Pushmataha County for the labor day weekend. We eat good. And of course, we do some geocaching. We didn’t find any this trip instead SuperPizzaBoy and I set one. It is where two British airplanes crashed during a training flight in World War II on a remote mountainside in Southeast Oklahoma.

One plane belly landed and the the other nosedived in so hard that the plane lifted a boulder into what the locals have always called “a natural tombstone.” That is quite a story but it doesn’t end there.

54 years later. 1997, in the small town of Rattan, OK, some elementary school children took an interest in the story and sought some more information on what happened. They wrote a letter t the Library of Congress. A staff member there took an interest in helping the kids. The kids decided that a monument was in order.

To make a long story short, three years later, on the 57th anniversary of the crash, a monument was dedicated to the four Brits who died on the mountain. The kids arranged to have a many relatives of those men to be there for the ceremony.

I think it is a great story. The kids did a lot but they couldn’t have done it without the support of their teachers and other adults who helped them.

SuperPizzaBoy and I hid a cache and submitted the request. It hasn’t been approved yet. It will be called “AT-6 Crash Site”.

If you want to go see it for yourself, the cache and the monument are at N 34 deg 22.120 minutes and W 095 deg 38.616 minutes.

Be careful. I wouldn’t go there after dark.

The monument.

The natural tombstone.

The plane.

Book Review “Nothing to Lose” by Lee Child

I just finished reading Lee Child’s “Nothing to Lose.” It is one of his Jack Reacher novels. I had never heard of Lee Child or the Jack Reacher series before I read this book. I’m hooked.

This book is from a genre I have never heard of before: “Revenge Fantasy.” Jack Reacher, the narrator and protagonist of the book, is a former MP who is now one hard dude. He walks everywhere he goes with nothing but the clothers on his back and an ATM card in his pocket. He doesn’t take any crap from anybody. Some of my favorite dialog:

In a diner, in Despair, Colorado, where four toughs are trying to get him to leave,

Tough: “You need to get going”

Reacher: “Going?”

“Out of here.”

“Out of where?”

“Out of this restaurant.”

“You want to tell me why?”

“We don’t like strangers.”

“Me either,” Reacher said. “But I need to eat somewhere. Otherwise, I get all wasted and skinny like you four.”

The book is full of dialog like that. I loved it. What nerd wouldn’t? Who needs a story with dialog like that.

Yes there is a story. Jack Reacher is walking from Maine to San Diego and he walks through Hope, Colorado on his way to Despair. He runs into trouble in the diner and gets arrested for vagrancy and then driven to the edge of Despair back to Hope.

He meets a policewoman, Vaughn, a woman with a secret, who is sympathetic to him. Eventually she consumates her sympathy with him. Later, Reacher finds out her secret. They also work together through a bunch of adventures to find out why the people of Despair including the fundamentalist, industrialist, mayor, are so hostile to outsiders.

What kept me going through this book is Reachers reparte with the various bad guys he comes up against. The story was ok but not very compelling. The problem with books with a mystery is that most of the time I am disapointed with the secret of the mystery. It is kind of like monster books. The buildup is the best part. The revealed monster is alwasy disappointing.

I give this book 2.5 stars out of 4. I’ll read more books by Lee Child.