April 27, 2013
Spring has bloomed at Tulsa’s Gilcrease Museum.
Spring Blooms at the Gilcrease Museum
Roaring River
April 24, 2013
Roaring River (click image for slideshow)
Last Saturday I returned to good old Roaring River for a couple of brief hikes along the Deer Leap and Devil’s Kitchen trails. I lost a filling in a front incisor while eating a PayDay peanut bar in Fairland; it would be four days until I could get into the dentist and make that incident his PayDay. But thankfully the tooth gave me no trouble, only spurring me to bite more carefully and eat more slowly.
I enjoyed a tasty lunch at the Emory Melton Inn at the park and then walked the hatchery area, finding that spring rains had swollen the spring’s outflow and had all of the basin falls going strong. The stream beside the lower ascending portion of the Devil’s Kitchen Trail was flowing, with water coming out of the cave at the far end of the ascent. I clambered atop the tumbled slabs at Devil’s Kitchen and got a self-portrait of myself in the kitchen along with distant and near shots of me beside a nearby spring.
The evening meal was at the Steak Inn at Shell Knob and was particularly tasty. I’ve only been making short hikes thus far this year, but at least I was back out on the trails!
Posted in day hike, photos, travel
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San Antone
I spent most of the second week of April 2013 in San Antonio, Texas for the national conference of the National Science Teachers Association.
I’ll spare you photos from the physics workshops I attended, since the Riverwalk is so much more picturesque:
The Riverwalk (click image for slideshow)
Dinosaur Valley
I drove over 1,200 miles on this trip, but in fellow science teacher Betty Henderson’s car with her and our colleague Theresa Miller. A total of ten science teachers from Bartlesville attended the conference, with most of us meeting up for dinner on the Riverwalk each night. During the conference former Bartlesville High School science teachers Chris Bradley and Sandra Cloud, who were at the conference, joined us for dinner. It was nice to catch up with them.
We had great weather during our stay in San Antonio, and Theresa, Betty, and I had fun stopping by Dinosaur Valley State Park on our way back home.
I didn’t get any hikes in on this trip, but I traipsed so much about the convention center and Riverwalk that I did not lack exercise!
Original Sin
April 6, 2013
Original Sin by Pandora’s Box
For over a year I posted each month about a “new” song I particularly enjoyed. But I became preoccupied with other activities and my new discoveries dwindled. So at the start of this week I decided to suspend that monthly task. But today my 12,000+ song music collection was on shuffle and an old Jim Steinman song was dealt, prompting me to link and write. (You can always search for my song posts by clicking on the music tag in the cloud in the right sidebar of this website.)
Jim Steinman’s bombastic rock opera is a guilty pleasure of mine. His songs are typically quite long, linking together several motifs, with extensive lyrics. Most of his best songs are dark tales of sex and sin, and Original Sin, which originally was performed by Pandora’s Box, is a classic example.
Unfortunately, Original Sin lacks the humor and interweaved contrasting motifs of Steinman’s best songs, such as one finds in I’ll Kill You If You Don’t Come Back and You Took the Words Right Out of My Mouth. The prior song’s “Bless all the girls” segment is a wonderful and welcome break from the driving main section, and those verses take me right back to my high school days, perfectly capturing the terrible wonders of teenage sexuality. The latter song is one of my all-time favorites with Steinman’s beautiful piano licks and Todd Rundgren’s tremendous production; the closing crescendo is wonderful, and I can’t help but clap along at the end.
The video I found for the Pandora’s box version of Original Sin features sensual art from Luis Royo, another form of guilty pleasure, and is NOT SAFE FOR WORK. His Fallen Angel is quite striking to me; you could build a tragic story around that pictured moment in time.
Taylor Dayne did a modified cover of the song, but it did not chart. Bonnie Tyler is another female artist who did great versions of Steinman songs, with him producing her album Faster Than the Speed of Night.
But of course the artist most closely associated with Steinman is the mighty Meat Loaf with the fantastic bombastic Bat Out of Hell, Dead Ringer, and Bat Out of Hell II: Back Into Hell albums. Meat did a cover of Original Sin on his Welcome to the Neighborhood album.
No one sings Steinman better than Meat Loaf, but I was sufficiently intrigued by the original Pandora’s Box version to order the album CD (it was not available on MP3 from Amazon or iTunes), which was made with Jim Steinman and has their original takes on several songs Meat Loaf would later cover on Bat Out of Hell II.
Some of Steinman’s lyrics are especially good, right up there with other choice bits which speak to me. The scrap of verse which hooked into my ears today and drew my full attention to the song, which had been playing in the background, was:
I’ve been looking for the ultimate crime
Infinite victims, infinitesimal time
And I’m so very guilty for no reason or rhyme
This and other Steinman songs supply plenty of reasons and rhymes for this sort of guilty pleasure.
Original Sin
I’ve been looking for an original sin
One with a twist and a bit of a spin
And since I’ve done all of the old ones
Till they’ve all been done in
Now I’m just looking
Then I’m gone with the wind
Endlessly searching for an original sinYou can dance forever
You got a fire in your feet
But will it ever be enough?
You know that it’ll never be enough
You can fly and never land
And never need to sleep
But will it ever be enough?
You know that it’ll never be enoughIt’s not enough to make the nightmares go away
It’s not enough to make the tears run dry
It’s not enough to live a little better every day
Everything that they taught us
Was nothing but lies
Everything that they brought us
Was nothing but bribesBut it’ll all be over now
All I wanted was a piece of the night
I never got an equal share
When the stars are out of sight
And the moon is down
The natives are so restless tonightI’ve been looking for an original sin
One with a twist and a bit of a spin
And since I’ve done all of the old ones
Till they’ve all been done in
Now I’m just looking
Then I’m gone with the wind
Endlessly searching for an original sinYou can lose yourself in pleasure
Till your body’s going numb
But will it ever be enough?
You know that it’ll never be enough
You can always take whatever
You conceivably could want
But will it ever be enough?
You know that it will never be enoughIt’s not enough to make the nightmares go away
It’s not enough to make the tears run dry
It’s not enough to live a little better every day
Everything that they taught us
Was nothing but lies
Everything that they brought us
Was nothing but bribesBut the lies are over now
All I wanted was a piece of the night
It never had to get so dark
When the stars are out of sight
And the moon is down
The natives are so restless tonightI’ve been looking for an original sin
One with a twist and a bit of a spin
And since I’ve done all of the old ones
Till they’ve all been done in
Now I’m just looking
For an original sinI’ve been looking for the ultimate crime
Infinite victims, infinitesimal time
And I’m so very guilty for no reason or rhyme
So now I’m just looking
And killing some time
Endlessly searching for the ultimate crimeI’ve been looking for an original sin
One with a twist and a bit of a spin
And since I’ve done all of the old ones
Till they’ve all been done in
Now I’m just looking
Then I’m gone with the wind
Endlessly searching for an original sinI’m applying for a license to thrill
Going out on the edge
Moving in for the kill
There’ll be hell to pay someday
So put it all on the bill
Cause we’ll always be paying
And paying until
We’re beyond expiration
With a license to thrillI’ve been looking for an original sin…
Posted in music, video
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Unexpected Obsolescence
March 30, 2013
From the Google Graveyard
Planned obsolescence has been a driver of our consumer culture since the Great Depression. I tend to resist it with respect to durable goods: my car is 12 years old and has over 200,000 miles on it, and my home repairs include appliance repairs, rather than replacements, whenever practical. However, the fast pace of technological development forces me to upgrade computers and related devices more frequently. I tend to buy high-powered desktop systems and use them for about five years, but I’ve been replacing my iPhone every two years and have frequently replaced my Kindle book readers and iPads.
The internet churns at an even faster pace. Companies and services come and go, with a long list of services I once relied upon which are now essentially defunct. I don’t particularly mourn dead online services like CompuServe or WebShots, but they certainly were useful to me in their day. But it is disruptive when the plug is pulled on a service you still rely upon. In a couple of weeks CableOne, my internet service provider, is pulling the plug on its webpages service, which forced me to relocate/recreate some websites with new providers. But what really has irked me is Google.
Google has a history of creating extremely useful free services, luring me into relying upon them, and then killing them off. This has happened with Google Notebook, will happen shortly with Google Reader, and will happen later this year with iGoogle. Slate has a nice Google Graveyard where you can put a flower on the graves of services you loved in their day.
My iGoogle homepage
I use iGoogle as my homepage, having set it up with a number of RSS feeds which show me the latest articles from a variety of favorite websites. That includes a list of articles pushed to me via Google Reader. I like to scan article headlines from certain sites and always read certain webcomics via Google Reader. Now I have to shift over to an alternate service for my RSS feeds and I might as well switch my homepage to a new service as well. What a pain! These services are not obsolete for me, even if many people now rely upon Twitter instead of RSS, dip into the random posts by their Facebook friends, or use FlipBoard and the like on tablets to see news articles.
I want to retain my one-screen listing of article headlines from my favorite sites which I can quickly scan each time I activate my desktop browser. So I’ve been looking at possible Google Reader replacements and the same for iGoogle, reading through one set of suggested alternatives after another, and there is an exhaustive listing if I get desperate.
Thus far I’m playing with igHome as an iGoogle replacement and it looks like Feedly is a good replacement for Google Reader, but no one has written a Feedly gadget for igHome yet, so I’ll keep using iGoogle and Google Reader/Feedly for now.
Posted in technology, web design
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Meador Manor 
