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Poultry ruling or punchline that took way too long?

Poultry ruling

As a public service, I’m repeating a newspaper headline from this week that I’m sure a lot of people missed because it’s 2023 and there’s no longer a place for the daily paper in their lives.

“Ruling puts water pollution stamp on poultry companies”

I had deja vu all over again when I stumbled across the story on page 4A of Friday’s edition of The Oklahoman.

The case began in 2005 when then Oklahoma Attorney General Drew Edmondson filed a lawsuit on behalf of the state against 13 integrated poultry companies.

Edmondson alleged the poultry companies — most based in Western Arkansas — had polluted the Illinois River basin from the spread of chicken manure across pasture and cropland .

So, why is this important enough that I write a blog post about it?

Well, in 2008 I was a Business News reporter for The Oklahoman, with agriculture as one of my beats. When a hearing began in February 2008 in Federal Court in Tulsa on Edmondson’s bid for an injunction against spreading poultry manure in the Illinois River watershed, my job required I cover it for the paper.

drew edmondson — Drew Edmondson at poultry hearing.

The hearing was held in Tulsa federal courthouse before Judge Gregory K. Frizzell.

Turns out, the injunction hearing turned into a long-haul of court dates. It ran through four February hearings before a week’s pause, and then picked up in March for another week.

There was testimony from “expert” witnesses and acrimony between attorneys for both sides.

Judge Frizzell was clearly frustrated over the slow pace of the hearing.

“Frankly, this is the longest preliminary injunction hearing I’ve ever conducted,” Frizzell was quoted as saying in one of my stories.

What do I remember of the hearing 15 years later? Seared into my memory is how vigorously attorneys from both sides of the case — plaintiff and defendants — attacked the credibility of every expert who testified.

In fact, attorneys worked so hard to destroy the credibility of the witnesses that the actual testimony seemed like an afterthought.

My friend Russ Florence also sat through each day of the hearing because his Tulsa-based public relations firm, Schnake Turnbo Frank, was working on behalf of the defendants. Today, Russ is President and CEO of Schnake Turnbo and is currently writing a book on the history of the firm, which includes a section on the trial.

Russ writes: “Like the Road Runner and Wile E. Coyote, each side tried to out-maneuver each — politically, legally, and publicly. They circled one another, trying to deliver a punch that would resonate …”

I was grateful when the hearing finally ended and I didn’t have to make a daily commute to Tulsa and back. Several months later Judge Frizzell denied the injunction request.

The actual trial over the pollution issue began the next year. I was no longer working at the paper, so someone else had the pleasure to cover it.

And now, almost 15 years later, we have our verdict. The poultry companies — 13 of them originally — are responsible for the poultry manure pollution of the Illinois Watershed.

“So much has happened since then,” Russ told me. “Some of the poultry companies have been acquired by others. Several of the key players have retired. And to think, I was single then, and am now married and have a fifth grader.”

And what of the punishment imposed on the responsible poultry companies?

“The parties are hereby directed to meet and attempt to reach an agreement with regard to remedies to be imposed in this action. In the event the parties are unable to reach an accord, the court shall enter judgment,” Judge Frizzell wrote in his ruling.

That’s it? It’s a ruling easily could have been imposed back in, say, 2009.

Seems like a joke that took way too long to get to the punchline.

Saving Christmas, 1983 version

As I looked out over the frozen tundra that was northwest OKC at 5 degrees this morning, I thought of another holiday season that was disrupted by bitter weather.

Back in 1983, I had just moved to Oklahoma City to work at The Daily Oklahoman newspaper. My folks lived in Fort Smith, Ark., roughly 200 miles to the east.

Anyway, as the newbie on the Sports staff at the paper, I would only get Christmas off if the holiday fell on my normal day off.

It did not, which meant that I had to drive over to Fort Smith a few days before the holiday to celebrate with my family, then drive back to work Christmas Eve and Christmas Day.

As I was preparing to leave town on roughly Dec. 18 or Dec. 19 (the dates are hazy now), a massive outbreak of Polar air settled over Oklahoma and brought sleet and snow with it.

The Polar air covered much of the continental U.S., and I recall stories about frozen underground water mains bursting as far south as Houston. Here’s a good read from the Farmers’ Almanac about the Christmas storm of 1983.

It was apparent the roads were going to be awful, so I even checked the bus schedule to Fort Smith. I called the bus station and they told me that all bus departures were canceled.

OKC temps 1983 So, I called my dad and asked him what he thought.

“Come on over,” he said. “It can’t be that bad.”

It was.

I managed to make it with no trouble to Henryetta, OK. But about 5 miles east of there, as I was climbing a fairly steep hill, my car began to fishtail and swung around 90 degrees. It went off I-40 backwards and into a snow-filled ditch.

Oh, great. These were days before we could even conceive of having a phone in our cars. How was I going to contact anyone?

As I walked up the steep shoulder to the road, a young man in a Camaro pulled over and asked if he could help. I asked him if he would call a wrecker in the next town.

He looked down at my car in the ditch and said, “I think you can drive out of this. The ditch flattens out at the bottom of the hill and you should be able to drive onto the highway. I’ll wait until I see if you can get out.”

I got back in my car, eased down the hill, made it to the flat part, and, like magic, drove right back onto the highway.

I never got to thank the Good Samaritan.

But the road was so ice covered that I drove no faster than 30 mph the remaining 85 miles to Fort Smith.

So, my trip took hours longer than expected. My parents were greatly relieved when I finally pulled up, but I was angry at my dad because he urged me to make the challenging drive.

A better mood took over, and we celebrated the holidays as a family.

There was still plenty of ice and snow to negotiate on the trip back to OKC, but I made sure I kept it on the road this time. I arrived safely back into town and made it to work my holiday shifts on time.

So, thank you, Mr. Good Samaritan, for saving Christmas in 1983.

Black Friday in 2008 was cold, dark … and fun

Shortly before 4 am at the Elk City Walmart store on ‘Black Friday’ 2008.

It was dark and cold on the Friday morning after Thanksgiving in 2008 as I left my mother-in-law’s farm outside of Hammon, OK.

At roughly 3:30 am on that Black Friday, I headed into Elk City to see what the crowd of shoppers was like at the Walmart store on the west side of town. The store was scheduled to open at 4 am.

My wife and mother-in-law thought I had gone off the deep end.

But it was all in the name of work, because I had been asked by Clytie Bunyan, then the Business Editor at The Oklahoman, to contribute some color from Elk City for the paper’s annual Black Friday shopping roundup.

I rolled into the Walmart parking lot about 10 minutes before 4. The only spot I could find was at the far fringes of the lot about 100 yards from the store. The rest of the spaces were filled with vehicles.

So, I walked toward the entrance, where hundreds of people sort of jumbled together in not so much of a line but what I would call a crush of shoppers. There was a genuine excitement in the air as they anticipated nabbing the ultimate Christmas bargains that had been advertised to go on sale on an hourly basis.

It reminded me of the incredible lines of folks that used to wait outside the Apple store when a new iPhone was released. A lot of camaraderie.

Folks patiently waited for the doors to open and chatted among themselves. I talked to a few people about what drew them to this store well before dawn on the day after Thanksgiving. They came not just from Elk City but from surrounding communities such as Sayre to the west, Mangum to the south and, yes, Hammon to the north.

In the darkness, I shot what was a poorly lighted photo — it’s at the top of this page — with whatever digital camera I had at the time (not an iPhone) and posted it to my Twitter account.

Shortly after 4 am, the doors opened and the crowd surged forward. I waited a few minutes until it cleared and walked in. There were already lines at the cash register as people claimed televisions, toys and whatever the hot electronic item of the day was.

I sipped free coffee the store offered as I wandered through the aisles and managed to get comments from shoppers and store personnel about the Black Friday shopping experience.

My Black Friday early morning routine remained the same for the next few years.

2009-walmart

Looking back on this memory from a distance of 14 years, it now seems like the Good Ol’ Days of Black Friday shopping. Back in those days, grabbing a copy of the newspaper fat with holiday advertising on Thanksgiving Eve was the first stop for most shoppers.

In just a few years, stores started opening ON Thanksgiving Day, so there was no longer the urgency to head out in the pre-dawn darkness.

Now we’ve come full circle. Online shopping has made a big impact on how we approach Christmas buying, and most stores — including Walmart — will again be closed on Thanksgiving this year.

So, I guess early morning Black Friday shopping is back, although in what I assume to be a less frantic manner. A Google search showed Walmart stores are opening at 6 am.

But, check your local listings, as they say. Here’s a link to a story in The Oklahoman that lists opening hours for OKC stores both on Thanksgiving Day and Black Friday. (The Wednesday paper this year was still fat with holiday ads.)

Yes, I fondly recall the camaraderie of that crowd of Elk City shoppers in the pre-dawn hours of 2008.

But I’ll still be in bed when the doors swing open this year.

Still an Apple fanboy after all these years at

The Apple IIe with two 5-1/4 inch floppy disks, just like my first setup

I read a magazine article in the late 1970s about a couple of young Californians who built a new stand-alone computer in the garage of a Cupertino, Calif. home.

They started a company called Apple Computer to sell their innovation.

I had never used a computer at that point in life. As a journalism student at Abilene Christian University, we did all of our writing either on our own antiquated typewriters or on IBM Selectric typewriters in the newsroom of ACU’s student newspaper.

Anyway, the more I read about Apple and its Apple II computer, the more fascinated I became with both the company and the concept. Like most people, when I thought of computers, IBM and its massive room-sized mainframes came to mind.

After graduating from ACU, I went to work at the Southwest Times Record in Fort Smith, Ark. We worked on typewriters when I arrived in late August 1978, but by the Spring of 1979 the paper had installed its first computer terminals for reporters and editors to use.

They were so-called “dumb” terminals that were tied to a mainframe computer. They crashed a lot, usually right at deadline.

Meanwhile, I was still keeping up with Apple and its computer, but thought it was way beyond what I could afford.

Besides, who ever thought of having a computer in your house?

Fast forward about seven years. I was working at The Oklahoman when J.T. Goold, one of my co-workers, said he had a used Apple IIe for sale. It had been his father’s,

So, I ponied up about $500 and bought the Apple IIe, which came with a green monitor and two 5-1/4 inch floppy disks.

That Apple IIe sealed my love of all things Apple. I learned to use word-processing software on that computer, as well as a spreadsheet, a simple database and a page-design program.

In a few months, I added a 1,200-baud modem, which opened up a whole new online world of what were then known as bulletin boards. Then came AppleLink.

I tried my hand at learning some BASIC programming skills, but never got much further than making a little routine that filled the screen with a single sentence.

I’ve written all of this because I’m deep into Steven Levy’s book, “Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution.” The Apple II and its creator, Steve Wozniak, play a huge role.

In Hackers, Levy detailed the founding and growth in the early 1970s of the Homebrew Computer Club in the San Francisco Bay Area. The club attracted scores of computer hackers who shared a vision of a future where everyone had a stand-alone computer of their own.

Levy wrote: “These were people intensely interested in getting computers into their homes to study, to play with, to create with … and the fact that they would have to build the computers was no deterrent.”

Steve Wozniak attended the very first Homebrew Club meeting, but it was a few years before he actually built his first computer. His friend Steve Jobs convinced him to create a company as partners and sell his computer invention.

So they began building computers in the garage of the home of Jobs’ parents. The Apple II became a runaway bestseller, bringing computers to millions of people.

I became an Apple fanboy after reading that early magazine article in the 1970s. The used Apple IIe that J.T. Goold sold me in the mid-1980s ensured it would last.

And here we are today. I’m writing this on an Apple MacBook Air while the my Apple iPhone keeps buzzing with text alerts and notifications. I’m reading Levy’s excellent “Hackers” on an Apple iPad Mini.

It’s been a long-term relationship, to say the least. Still an Apple fanboy after all these years.

Newspapers on quest to level search playing field

A couple weeks ago, as I flipped through my edition of The Oklahoman newspaper I was confronted by end-of-the-world sized type in a full-page advertisement.

“DON’T LET BIG TECH CANCEL LOCAL NEWS,” the headline screamed.

Beneath it were a couple of paragraphs of text, one of which read:

“Local news strengthens our community, but local newspapers across the country are under threat. Big Tech takes advantage of the news and information created by local publishers, but they won’t pay for it.”

The ad was placed by a newspaper industry group and targeted “Big Tech” giants Google and Facebook, although neither were named in the copy.

In the ad, the newspaper group urged Congress to adopt an antitrust “safe harbor” law — the Journalism Competition and Preservation Act (JCPA). That legislation would allow newspapers to negotiate collectively for payments from Google and Facebook for using headlines and snippets of their work in search results.

We all use these sites. When users click on the headlines surfaced on a Google search, they are linked back to the full stories on the original newspaper websites.

I was intrigued.

I thought newspapers welcomed traffic driven from Google or Facebook to their websites, because they are in a desperate battle for readers and for survival as an industry.

Online readership has become a critical element to sustaining newspapers into the future. I thought readers following a headline back to the original newspaper website would be like a gift from God.

I’ll give you an example:

Let’s say there’s been an oil well explosion near Cordell in Southwest Oklahoma. I hear a rumor of the explosion at the grocery store, so I do a Google search for oil well, explosion and Cordell.

Google returns a headline from the Cordell Beacon, which I click on to read the Beacon’s story in its website. Google drove that traffic to the Cordell paper.

That’s not the complete story, says Brett Wesner, president of Wesner Publications, which publishes the Cordell Beacon. Wesner also is chair of the National Newspaper Association, an industry group that represents thousands of smaller community newspapers nationwide.

While newspapers need the traffic driven from aggregators like Google, the tech giants sell billions of dollars in advertising to their own websites based on the content they present and the eyeballs it attracts.

“Google and Facebook generated $4 million in U.S. advertising revenue every 15 minutes during the first quarter of 2022,” Wesner wrote in an editorial that has been widely distributed. “That amount could fund hundreds of local journalists in every state in the country.”

Wesner is a Cordell native and San Francisco resident, from where he oversees his Wesner Publications group, which includes 10 community newpapers across the state. A Brown University graduate, he was David Boren’s press secretary in the late 1980s.

Traffic generated from Google and Facebook is critical to newspapers, Wesner said. Yet, the news those publications generate is just as important to the tech giants, he insisted.

If Google or Facebook lost access to Cordell news because the Beacon refused to allow it to post anything, it wouldn’t cause much of a ripple.

“But what if everybody started doing that?” Wesner asked in reply to my question about the JCPA “safe harbor” legislation. “Then when you Googled the Uvalde shooting, for instance, the only listings you get are your crazy uncle Bill’s rantings on a Facebook post. You don’t have access to any real media takes. If you Googled them, if those were the only listings you got, how credible would that make them on news issues. Not very.

“So, we need them. They need us.”

And that brings us to the proposed bipartisan legislation that seems to have a lot of Congressional support. But it’s slow moving.

“I think we will get to the negotiating table,” Wesner said. “I think they JCPA will be the path for that. We have had a lot of support from both sides of the aisle.”

The U.S. industry has a template for Google and Facebook payments for content. Both the European Union and Australia have recently passed legislation that requires the tech giants to compensate local news outlets for using their content.

How much money would newspapers expect to gain from collective negotiations with Google and Facebook?

“We don’t know the answer to that until we begin negotiating,” Wesner said. “The problem is we can’t even begin negotiating without this antitrust legislation.”

The search for a solution continues.

The ‘first’ video game, Pong turns 50 this summer

Somewhere in the early 1970s, I stumbled upon a video game called “Pong,” and was immediately infatuated. I couldn’t get enough, playing the game against my cousin on an old black and white television.

If you remember Pong, you know it was a simple game that featured two paddles and a sort of ball-like squarish blip that made a cool sound when it connected with the paddle. You connected Pong to your television and used simple controls to move the paddles to return the “ball” to your competitor in a crude table tennis simulation.

That’s all Pong could do, but the world had really never seen a game like this that could be played on your TV. Pong even kept score for you at the top of the screen.

Pong screen Turns out, Pong is hailed as the world’s first video game and it was released 50 years ago this summer. It was created by a young inventor and entrepreneur named Nolan Bushnell, who founded Atari to market Pong and other games.

I recently saw a Q&A published with Bushnell on the Daring Fireball website. The Q&A caught my eye because I had the opportunity to interview Bushnell during an appearance at the Oklahoma History Center in 2006.

Click here to read the story I wrote for The Oklahoman from that event.

Anyway, Atari became a huge hit after it licensed Pong to Sears and the national retailer sold 150,000 units of the game. That led to other popular Atari games.

Bushnell eventually sold Atari in 1976 to Warner Communications for a reported $28 million.

Pong was such a ground-breaking innovation that today Bushnell is known as the “Father of the Video Game” and was named to Newsweek magazine’s list of “50 Men Who Changed America.”

In his Oklahoma City appearance back in 2006, Bushnell talked about how Pong was created and designed on the circuit board to do only one thing.

“What I did was create the video game out of digital building blocks,” Bushnell said. “But it was architected in such a way that this board was designed to play Pong and that was all that it would ever do.”

Atari released many other game titles, including Breakout and Combat, after its success with Pong and eventually produced a popular personal computer. The Atari 2600 game console is considered one of the most successful game platforms in history.

An aside: I’m also a Steve Jobs fan, and discovered a connection between Jobs and Bushnell from reading the Walter Isaacson biography of Jobs published in 2011. Bushnell hired a 19-year-old Steve Jobs to work at Atari to develop another game known as “Breakout.” Read more on the Bushnell-Jobs relationship here.

So, Nolan Bushnell created Pong, founded Atari and single-handedly launched a multi-billion dollar industry. But I can’t forgive him for one thing.

He also founded the Chuck E. Cheese restaurant chain.

BONUS: Read this fascinating Wired magazine story about the creation of Pong and how Bushnell scammed a young software engineer to come to work for him to make the game a reality. https://www.wired.com/story/inside-story-of-pong-excerpt/

Atari system

A proposal: let’s destroy ‘The Process’ in the NBA

Thunder arena — Plenty of good seats available shortly before tipoff at a Thunder game in February this season.

Editor’s note: Although I attribute the concept described in this post to radio talk show host Dan Patrick, my friend Don alerted me to the fact that it was originally floated by sports guru Bill Simmons. So, I want to give credit where it’s due, and a salute to Simmons for a worthy idea.

On the list of things in this world that make me crazy, you can put the concept of “tanking” by professional sports teams close to the top.

If you’re not a sports fan, you should know that tanking means a team is trying to maneuver for the best possible draft position. It does that by having as bad a record as possible at the end of the season.

Sometimes it’s called ‘The Process’ (wink, wink).

Teams tank not by asking their players to not play hard, but by manipulating the roster so their least experienced get most of the playing time. I offer the Oklahoma City Thunder’s mostly G-League lineup down the stretch this season as Exhibit A.

Oklahoman columnist Berry Tramel put it best last fall when he wrote “losing is the path to winning.” The idea is that if a team is horrible for two, three, four seasons it will eventually be able to draft the next ‘unicorn’ that will turn it all around.

Meanwhile, local fans lose incentive to follow their team and actually show up at games. The thousands of unused seats on a nightly basis at Paycom Center this season is a prime example.

I wrote about my opposition to tanking and the need to take a “win now” philosophy before the season began. You can read it here.

But today, I’m here to offer an alternative to the tanking strategy that will keep fans more engaged as the season concludes. I credit this idea to radio talk show host Dan Patrick, who proposed something similar on his show earlier in the season.

Here’s how it would work as I envision it:

The NBA would create an in-season, six-week tournament for the bottom teams in the standings. The league would set an in-season cutoff date of February 28 with the six teams with the league’s worst records qualifying for the tournament.

Then for the remaining six weeks of the season, qualifying teams would play to win as many games as possible before the season ends. The team that has the best record in the season-closing “tournament” would be awarded the No. 1 pick in the draft.

Thunder action Teams would have every incentive to put their best roster on the court. Fans would have a reason to show up and cheer their local team down the stretch.

The league could make a big deal out of the tournament, with separate nightly standings, maybe even a trophy for the winning team. The rest of the draft order for the bottom six would follow according to their finish in the tournament.

However, it needs a name. The Race to Save Face? Bottoms Up? Sprint to the Finish? I’ll let the marketers handle that.

My friend Steve poo-poos this concept because the league’s conferences are not balanced talent-wise. But he’s a tanking enthusiast and wears unicorn-colored glasses.

So, what does happen if the team with the seventh worst record on Feb. 28 loses so many games that it has the league’s worst record by season’s end?

That team is shut out of the tournament, so it only gets the seventh pick in the draft order. But it has no incentive keep losing, and that’s the point.

Thank you, DP, for sharing this idea.

So, what’s keeping the league from adopting The Race to Save Face and creating some excitement for bottom-feeding teams?

Nothing that I can see. Let’s destroy “The Process.”

The newspaper visionary and the skeptical student

The 1970s vintage IBM Selectric typewriter

I was sitting in a news writing class at Abilene Christian University in 1977 when I heard something so preposterous that it has stuck with me for more than 40 years.

Our professor, Dr. Charlie Marler, speculated about the future of the newspaper industry. He said that some day we could get our news on a TV -like screen and have the choice to print out the stories that we wanted to read.

No one laughed out loud, but I had a good laugh to myself. Yeah, right, I thought. Not sure where Dr. Marler came up with this kooky idea.

At the time, the IBM Selectric typewriter was cutting edge technology for journalists. We were privileged to be able to type our stories on one in the late 1970s for The Optimist, ACU’s student newspaper.

Fast forward four decades. We can now see how dead-on Dr. Marler’s prediction was in the 1970s.

The fact that most of the world now gets its news instantaneously via a screen attached to a computer, tablet or phone made my old college professor appear to be a modern-day Nostradamus.

The rapid decline of the newspaper industry has been well documented. From my perspective, it began in the late 1990s as the public began finding news sources online and accelerated in the 2000s when WiFi became ubiquitous and smart phone use proliferated.

In fact, I accepted an early retirement offer in 2008 because my employer, The Oklahoman, reduced its workforce that year by 150 people or so. That ended a 30-year newspaper career that I launched upon graduation from ACU in 1978.

The Oklahoman was (and I think remains) the largest newspaper in the state. It has undergone multiple rounds of reductions in the years since I left.

All of which led to this week’s announcement by The Oklahoman. Beginning on March 26, it would no longer print Saturday editions.

The paper will be “digital only” on Saturdays, meaning it will be found only on your screen. A host of other daily newspapers owned by the Gannett corporation have announced the end of print Saturday editions on the same date.

You called it 40-plus years ago, Dr. Marler. I’m pretty sure that the “digital only” newspaper model eventually will eliminate print publication on most other days of the week.

Maybe the Sunday edition will be the only day we can actually get our hands on a printed newspaper. If we’re lucky.

Perhaps I shouldn’t have been so skeptical of Dr. Marler’s prediction at the time I heard it. Because cartoonist Chester Gould, an Oklahoma native, had introduced an even bigger fantasy for his Dick Tracy comic strip back in the 1940s.

It was a two-way communications device worn on the wrist.

I was a huge fan of the Dick Tracy comic strip as a kid and infatuated by the device that Tracy wore on his wrist through which he had instantaneous communications.

The future was right there on the funny pages for decades and we didn’t recognize it.

Gould’s fantasy device became reality when the Apple Watch debuted in 2015. Today, millions of people wear Apple’s incredible two-way communication device on their wrists.

Not sure who laughed at Chester Gould’s vision when it appeared in the Dick Tracy comic in the 1940s.

Or who was laughing aside from me at the outrageous prediction of Dr. Charlie Marler in a 1970s ACU classroom.

But no one’s laughing now.

Oklahoma, we have all been here before

Jenni

It seems like deja vu all over again for Oklahoma.

I’m talking about the similarities between Lincoln Riley’s unexpected departure from OU this week and that of Kevin Durant from the OKC Thunder in 2016. The feeling of being blindsided. The widespread anger. The loyal hero who steps up.

As I read Jenni Carlson’s column in The Oklahoman this morning on how Bob Stoops has further endeared himself to OU fans by stepping up in the wake of Lincoln Riley’s departure, another name instantly came to mind.

Russell Westbrook.

Russ page Russ stepped up big time in 2016 after Kevin Durant unexpectedly abandoned the OKC Thunder ship. He said “why not” and signed a 3-year contract extension before the season even began.

Here’s how he was quoted by espn.com:

“There’s nowhere else I would rather be than Oklahoma City,” Westbrook said at a news conference to announce the deal. “You guys have basically raised me. I’ve been here since I was 18, 19 years old. You guys did nothing but great things for me. Through the good and the bad, you guys supported me through it all, and I appreciate it. Definitely when I had the opportunity to be able to be loyal to you guys, that’s the No. 1 option. Loyalty is something that I stand by.”

It was an incredibly feel good moment after the anger generated across the state when KD announced on the Players Tribune on July 4 that he was taking his talents to the Left Coast. His announcement prompted me to write a blog post with some lyrics from The Beatles that were appropriate for the occasion.

Now we have Coach Stoops stepping up as interim coach at a critical time for Sooners. On Twitter, fans heaped praise on Stoops not only for stepping in but for the calming comments he made at the news conference announcing his temporary return.

And why not, to borrow Russ’s famous phrase.

Don’t let your facts get in the way of my beliefs

encyclopedia2 — A set of Encyclopedia Americana from the 1960s.

When I was a kid, we had a big set of Encyclopedia Americana in our house that was my go-to Google-of-the-day for every bit of fact finding and trivia that drew my interest.

Once, when I was a teenager, my dad and I had a disagreement over some fact about a foreign country or its people, I can’t remember which.

However, my dad was spouting an opinion as fact that I was certain was wrong. So, I grabbed an encyclopedia, looked it up and read the part to him that proved that he was wrong.

“Now you’re taking it too far,” he said, clearly irritated.

Translation: don’t let your facts get in the way of my entrenched beliefs.

Anyway, I’m writing this because we’re seeing people in our society make up their minds and cling to ‘alternative facts’ when clearly there is no evidence to back them up. Or there’s evidence that shows that it is wrong and they still cling to their beliefs.

The dispute over vaccines, for instance. People would rather take their Uncle Jimmy Joe’s word that the COIVID-19 vaccines are making thousands of people sick or, worse yet, killing them, than accept statistics kept by health care professionals and scientists that show vaccines are incredibly safe and effective.

I’m pretty sure it’s really an issue motivated first and foremost by political beliefs. Red state. Blue state.

But we all stake out our territory on different issues and refuse to budge even when we’re smacked in the face by reality. I’m sure I’m guilty, as well.

And that leads me to an issue that really disturbed me this week. One of my neighbors whom I like and enjoy hanging out with in his driveway, stated as fact that a high-ranking OKC city official gets a cut from every concession sold at Scissortail Park because he made a donation to its construction.

I ask him to offer some proof. “They reported it on Channel 9,” he said.

If it had been reported on TV or in the newspaper, and there was evidence to support the allegation, the story would be huge and talked about by everyone in the city. The official would likely lose his job.

scissortail park1 — Scissortail Park in early November

Instead, it’s told as fact by a retired OKC resident who is skeptical about the whole MAPS program and Scissortail Park, as well. He doesn’t need actual proof, because he heard the story told as fact from others who share his point of view.

I even ran the allegation past a respected reporter for The Oklahoman that I trust and who told me that “none of it is true.” I’m taking his word for it, because, if true, it would have been a giant Page 1 headline.

The disturbing aspect is that my neighbor repeats the story to anyone who will listen, and in my far north OKC neighborhood there are a lot of takers.

I think some of it has to do with the fact that our neighborhood is so far out of the city’s core that people like my neighbor don’t see the benefit that MAPS and Scissortail Park have brought to our city.

As I walked back home after the encounter the other day, I couldn’t help but think of my dad and his long ago wrongly held opinion-as-fact. Even the Encyclopedia Americana couldn’t budge him off his belief.

Sad to say, that’s how it is with a lot of American society today.