Popular.

The Anadarko High School Warriors played the Chickasha Fighting Chicks (haha) in basketball Friday night. Anadarko won, and the people rejoiced. But who are we kidding? The real reason for watching the game was this guy, who apparently joins the cheerleaders at every game to lead Anadarko team spirit.

My roommate Jaime says Charlie's been cheering Anadarko on for at least ten years, as long as she's lived here.

"Happiness at the misfortune of others."

The New York Times reports, with just a hint of subtle schadenfreude, that the Los Angeles Times has ceased to be a considerable journalistic force in their own region.

My favorite parts of this article lie in the sources.

"'We need a paper that’s more, and this is less,' said Ms. Frère, 66. 'I think it’s just not a world-class paper, no matter how you cut it. It used to be a world-class paper.'"

Who is Ms. Frère, and what are her qualifications? Well, she's a stationery store owner. Her biting journalistic commentary often draws more crowds than Colbert, yes?

"'When I came here back in ’74, it would take me all day to read the paper. Now it takes me 10 minutes — tops,' said Quintin Cheeseborough, 57, who is self-employed and comes to the Los Angeles Central Library occasionally to read The Times. On a recent morning, he was reading The Financial Times and The Wall Street Journal, but not The Los Angeles Times."

Cheeseborough claims self-employment and reads The Times at the Los Angeles Central Library. Sounds like a homeless man to me - at least, that's the company I often find reading the periodicals at the downtown library in OKC.
Holding one's own sign next to the intersection qualifies as self-employment.

"'We don’t even have a football team. So what does that tell you?' said Mr. Cheeseborough, a note of resignation in his voice."

Touché, Mr. Cheeseborough. Touché.

Is there no justice?

It's really unfortunate that sometimes when you commit acts of rampant vandalism, you get publicly humiliated for it later...especially if you're only a 12-year-old, chucking objects at elderly people and women with strollers.

It kills me, how inappropriately broadcast our public acts can be. Someone silence that blogger, quick! He has no right to be spreading images of anyone in public to the world wide web. Heaven knows, he's no journalist.

To read more about this quasi-journalistic blogging vigilante, visit the New York Times online and  read about Daniel Cavanaugh, a neighborhood blogger in New York who faces the threat of retribution for blogging about his neighbors.

Where does the good go?

"I WAS 9, my brother, Jeb, was 8, and maybe if we’d been born in a city we would not have started building treehouses and forts, igloos and tepees, even digging a hole in the ground that we covered with thick branches of pine, oak and maple. Or maybe if our mother and father did not fight most every night, their yelling rising up the stairwell like some poisonous vapor to us and our two sisters, Jeb and I would not have gone looking for the scrap lumber we found under the closed summer camps near our rented house in southern New Hampshire — two-by-fours and two-by-sixes, warped plywood and long planks of rough spruce."

If that doesn't hook you, I don't know what will. This article by Andre Dubus III, a description of his growing-up times, points to a memoir I'll gladly read. Give it a read, and see it in your mind.

I would like to call it beauty.

Um, of course the masses eat up stuff like this, an article about a celebrity blogger whose blog mainly claims attention for being positive and obsessive about famous people, thus yielding him invites to parties with said famous people.

The article says, "Blogging, even about celebrities, is not glamorous. Mr. Eng posts about 65 items per day, seven days a week, from the moment he wakes up — sometimes at 5 a.m. Sometimes he doesn’t sleep."

It's people like us who make guys like Jared Eng successful.

The piece goes on to say his blog will easily earn seven figures this year, but I don't envy his lifestyle enough to envy his paycheck.

This is the thing.

The New York Times explores new social media in this article on several different new social media outlets:  Instagram and Path for pictures and video, Ping for sharing in musical taste and Diaspora for building a virtual stockade fence around your online profile. New social mediums are scrabbling desperately to find a niche within huge networks like Facebook and Twitter - not a new movement, but a hole to fill.

Sometimes innovation just means a new take on someone else's idea.

Learning to breathe...er, blog.

Like any obedient child raised in a conservative Christian home, I love parameters, guidelines, rules and instructions (anything that tells you what to do, really).  I enjoy a good syllabus.

And if I've learned one thing about blogging this week, it's that blogs have virtually no spoken rules, and sparse unspoken.

"Don't complain all the time," Dr. Clark says. I learned a long time ago that most people really only care about your problems in relation to their own lives.

When I break unspoken rules, I hope for grace. At the very least, I won't be blogging about how trashy the girl next to me is...first, because Chynna's not trashy at all, and second because it's bad blogging form.

Rocks and water.

Drive straight down the barren terrain of I-44 West, until the first Chickasha exit draws you away with its ever-present Festival of Lights sign to an unassuming Highway 62. Go five over in Chickasha, but make up for it by hitting five under when you pass through Verden ten minutes later (it's a speed trap). Ignore the sheep in the Verden Elementary parking lot; they wander freely.

You may start to feel soon after Verden that you've reached the end of Oklahoma civilization, and - well - you may be right.

About five minutes after that, you'll see the muted lights of Anadarko.
Indian City will welcome you with all the contradictions of locked arms and grasping fists.
"In a dark hole," the natives call it, but you'll notice how most of them never seem to leave for good.

A couple of miles down 62, outside the town itself, a sign declares "Oakridge Camp." At the westward edge of this camp rests a newly painted brown house, and outside it the red-dirtiest car that ever parks on campus at UCO.

That's where you'd find me.