ORU finds money!

We can all stop speculating now. ORU will not become the Disneyland of the Midwest, nor will TU acquire a South campus. Mart Green has ridden into Tulsa on his white horse to save ORU with $70 million dollars and a regime change. There was a Tulsa World article today about him. Apparently he’s a nut, but a well-meaning nut. In the article, Matt Green talks about his affinity for fasting. He’s fasted on only juice for forty days and just water for 33 days. Is that possible, let alone healthy? I’ve heard of people dying after just two weeks without food.

I want to see this!

Did anyone see Four Sheets to the Wind? It looks fascinating, if only because it was filmed in Tulsa and about present-day American Indians. It doesn’t seem to be playing anywhere anymore, and it’s not out on DVD. How frustrating.
A review is here!

For all the TU fans staking out my blog

It looks like I was one of the few to post on the Rice-TU game last weekend, so I’ve gotten quite a bit of traffic since from people looking for more on that story.

Well here it is.

The Associated Press published an article today about TU filing a complaint to NCAA over the MOB’s half-time show. Here’s the story in the Houston Chronicle.

For once, I’ve got to say that TU is wrong on this one. Having grown up in Texas and knowing a few students at Rice, I’ll tell you that this is just the way Rice is. And filing a complaint won’t do any good, the MOB uses the same strategy with every team they play and clearly it hasn’t bothered the NCAA.

And the students aren’t upset anyway. As one TU student told me, “you’d be more offended if they didn’t do it.” So chalk it up to the Mob choosing the obvious for the spirit of their half-time show.

A few queer things

 Just a few tidbits for today of Things I Have Learned in The Home of Will Rogers:

 

– Oklahoma had the longest constitution when it joined the Union.

-Out of all the states, Oklahoma has the least number of men and women who have never married (25% of men and 19% of women)

-Although there are more registered Democrats than Republicans in the state, the Republican candidate for president has carried the state in every election since the 1960s.

- Oklahoma does not celebrate Earth Day. Instead, they have Land Run Day, the first day of the state-sanctioned land runs in the 1880s. Elementary school students celebrate this day by pairing up boy-girl and running with a red wagon in hand onto the playground to stake their territory. (Students who run before the teacher’s go-ahead are punished).

In my freshman year of college I remember many of my new female friends from Oklahoma rushing off during the weekend to get fitted for bridesmaid dresses and attending weddings in their hometowns of high-school friends. The sheer number of highschool sweetheart hitchups was the greatest contributor to any culture shock I experienced moving here, along with the discovery that alcohol isn’t sold in grocery stores.

Camping trip?

Heading up I-35 through Oklahoma yesterday, I was struck by how beautiful the Arbuckle mountains were, especially set against the heavy drizzle and cloud cover. That section of the interstate that runs through the mountains is my favorite part of the Austin-Tulsa drive. The hills on either side of the road had recently been burned clear of brush, and it looked exactly like the sort of view that Alexander Hogue would have painted. Actually, none of them are mountains anymore because they only stand 300-500 ft above ground level, but back in the Precambrian era mountains they were. I did a bit of digging and found the oldest state park is there in the Arbuckles at Lake Murray, and south of Davis there’s Turner Falls that were once “Oklahoma’s No. 1 Honeymoon Spot” (I hear that the popular choice now for okie honeymoons are Sooner home games).There’s even a Lifestyle Center that treats Type II diabetes. Pretty cool, huh?

Tulsa : 10th circle of hell

I made the TU-Rice game today in Houston. The afternoon was miserably cold and dreary, but a surprising number of the determined alums made it in their blue and gold ponchos. It was a good game, but it was the half-time show that was the surprise. Rice’s band, the MOB, did a skit they called: Where the hell is Todd Graham? (Todd Graham is TU’s football coach, who last year was hired away from Rice who had hired him away from TU the year previous to tha). The band did a short number for each circle of hell as they searched for TG. Guess where he was? The 10th circle of hell, Tulsa. While there’s something about the MOB’s irreverency that tickles me, I found the sweatshirts most touching. The handful of Rice students in the stadium had made sweatshirts with “University of Tulsa” on the front and “We hire sellouts” on the back. I mean, real 100% cotton hoodies. Now that shows devotion. We would have been satisfied with T-shirts.

And for the curious, here’s the link to the script of the MOB’s half-time show.

Now if Rice wants to pick on TU, they could have picked something much easier, like say, TU’s truly meaningless chants. (Ex: Oo-saa-saa, Oo-saa-saa, get ‘em in the head with a big kilbassa! I don’t know what a kilbassa is, but it sounds very illegal.) As it is, Rice calling Tulsa “Hell” is the pot calling the kettle black; Houston merits that title on the strength of its roads alone.

Hello world!

This is my first post! This will be a blog about life in Oklahoma and Tulsa in particular, in the style of A year in Provence and Under the Tuscan Sun, albeit in a land where the mortages are a heckuva lot cheaper. True to style, I’m a foreigner to Oklahoma and the Midwest; I consider Austin, Texas my home. I moved north to T-town back in the day when the University of Tulsa offered me a scholarship for tuition. And now I’m here for your blog-reading entertainment.

Tune in daily for fresh criticism, pictures and okie cultural tidbits from the home of White Trash Wednesday.