The World According to "Aaarrgh!"

All The News That’s Fit To Print

July 19th, 2011

In the case of the Bartlesville Examiner-Enterprise, the news that’s fit to print is what the powers-that-be tell it to print. It’s kind of like the Twilight Zone episode where all the townspeople must think happy thoughts or they are banished to the cornfield by little Timmy, the local newspaper is only allowed to print happy things. No bad news allowed!

You would think when the largest employer in town announces, to the surprise of its own employees, that it is splitting itself into two, that there would be some news about how the employees, local merchants, local governments, etc., feel about the idea. Nope! Not our Examiner-Enterprise! No, we get a canned AP article featuring a quote from the head of the Chamber of Commerce about how this really won’t change anything. It won’t? Hmmm. This is a huge company that has been subsidizing the town and its people for the better part of past century, it announces that it will no longer exist in the form it has existed in for the better part of the past century, pretty much every school, church, and organization depends on this company for financial support, and it will no longer exist, and yet nothing will change? Can we say “denial”? I knew you could!

This morning I heard on Tulsa radio station KFAQ some big news about Bartlesville, that the football coach had quit to take a lesser position with a private school in Tulsa. I was flabbergasted! Not a word about it in the Examiner-Enterprise. Hmmm. Here you have the most successful coach in school history quitting less than a month before school begins to take a lesser job at a much smaller school. That seems rather fishy, and newsworthy, to me, but yet not a word about it in the local paper?

I’ve heard two different theories about why Coach Smith suddenly quit. Theory One is that the coach threw a big hissy fit because his son’s coaching contract was not renewed and quit. If his son had been hired with him at Victory Christian that would be plausible, but his son wasn’t, so why quit and downgrade? Theory Two is that he was only hired to coach selected children, and now that those children have graduated, he is expendable. Given the selfishness, nepotism, corruption, and quid pro quo’s that are so commonplace in Bartlesville, this is entirely believable. While I buy into Theory Two, I have my own theory. Theory Three – Ron knew that with ConocoPhillips disbanding, the future of Bartlesville looks bleak, and that the local politics, grandstanding, and backstabbing is intolerable, so he bailed when he got the chance, like any same and rational person would do….

Good luck, Ron, and it been great having you as our coach….

Posted in Aaarrgh, Bartlesville, Oklahoma, Sports | No Comments »

Isn’t It Ironic?

July 19th, 2011

Okay, maybe it’s not ironic, per se, but just plain bizarre. The other day, I was driving home listening to my Alanis Morissette CD. It was on the song “Head Over Feet” when I popped it out, and, to my surprise, I was still hearing “Head Over Feet”. Hmmm. I looked at the CD case, and there was the CD. Double hmmm! It turns out, that at the exact time I was listening the “Head Over Feet” on CD, it was playing on the radio station I was tuned to, so when I popped out the CD, the radio came on and the exact same song was playing! Even weirder, it was at the exact same place in the song, so I didn’t miss a beat!

Posted in Aaarrgh, Life, The Arts (music/poetry/art) | No Comments »

It’s The End Of The World As We Know It!

July 14th, 2011

ConocoPhillips announced today that it is breaking itself up into two piece – a exploration and production company and a refining and marketing company. This is a huge deal to Bartlesville. Say hello to depressed home prices, high unemployment, and a lingering economic malaise, a la Ponca City. And poor Ponca City. You might as well stick a fork in it and call it done!

Ironically, the second betrayal of Bartlesville is being perpetrated by the same villian who did it the first time, Jim Mulva. It was in 2002, as the CEO of Phillips Petroleum, that Mulva decided that in order to survive Phillips must merge with Conoco, and then proceeded to move the headquarters, along with several thousand employees, to Houston. Got to get bigger and merge or die, was the argument. Can’t stay in Oklahoma, it’s just not international enough. No access to airports, even though Tulsa, a mere 45 minutes from Bartlesville, has a fine airport. And an international one, too, thus the moniker “Tulsa International Airport”. To make the betrayal easier, Mulva promised that the combined company would have a strong presence in Oklahoma for decades to come, as it will not falter! Too big to fail, and that kind of rot! Of course, while the rascal was talking nice to us, he was laughing with his chums about how those stupid Okies bought the bologna-sausage hook, line, and sinker. And we did! So, we went from having 10,000 employed in Bartlesville and several thousand employed in Ponca City to 3,500 in Bartlesville and 850 in Ponca City.

Well, Mulva has announced that he is retiring next year. And, as is customary, much of his retirement is in stock. Now, being a smart man, he wants to boost the stock prices as much as he can. If you have been following the stock of ConocoPhillips the past several years, its performance has been lackluster at best, as the company has been weighed down with a huge amount of debt due to poor acquisitions. Also, the value of shares was rather diluted. So, Mulva decided to sell the poor assets and take the cash to buyback stock, thus increasing stock value. The problem is that he couldn’t find any buyers for some of the assets. What to do, what to do.

Marathon Oil was in a similar situation, and devised an ingenious plan – it lumped all of it underperforming assets together, and spun them off as a new company. Brilliant! So, today, Mulva, the man who said that Phillips was just too small and had to merge with Conoco to survive, decided that ConocoPhillips is just too large to survive and it must be smaller! So, he took the underperforming assets, the refining and marketing operations, and expelled them, or should I say made them a new company! And, wouldn’t you know, prices of ConocoPhillips stock jumped at the news. Imagine that! With a stroke of the pen, Mulva just raised the value of his retirement by millions of dollars!

Of course, in doing so, he threw Oklahoma under the bus yet again. The 3,500 employees are for the combined company. Many of these employees will not be needed by either of the two smaller companies. More than likely, the new companies will headquarter in Houston, and those Oklahoma employees attached to the management of the divisions that will soon become independent companies will go to Houston as well.

What will really shock the Bartlesville economy is the removal of the corporate money. Big corporations give big money; smaller corporations, not so much. Pretty much every entity in Bartlesville, the schools, the churches, the scouts, the arts, rely heavily on donations from ConocoPhillips. When ConocoPhillips ceases to exist in a few months, those donations will cease to exist as well. The effect of the breakup will ripple through every aspect of the local economy. The grand new hotel which was built to please ConocoPhillips will no longer be needed, because there will no longer be a ConocoPhillips to serve. Dance schools, gymnastic schools, and other such entities which serve the children of ConocoPhillips employees will cease to exist, as there will be no more children to serve. The schools, both private and public, which rely on ConocoPhillips to help operate, will find themselves prostate; programs will be gutted, schools will be closed. Bartlesville will be a shell of itself.

There is hope, however. If Bartlesville embraces the metropolis to the south, and redefines itself from a stand-alone city to the coolest and trendiest of Tulsa’s suburbs, it will weather the storm. It will take a lot of effort and the willingness of the ruling elite to cede their grip on power and control and accept their new role as vassals to Tulsa. This is the only hope for Bartlesville to survive and thrive and not suffer the slow, depressing, unavoidable stagnation that is occurring 75 miles to the west in Ponca City.

Posted in Aaarrgh, Bartlesville, Life, Oklahoma, Politics | No Comments »

Council Coup d’état Not Just A Bartlesville Phenomenon

July 13th, 2011

In the town of Quartzsite, Arizona, the City Council has declared a “State of Emergency” and ousted the elected mayor, Ed Foster, over a video which resulted in death threats against the members of the council. The video was of a citizen, Jennifer Jones, being arrested during the public comment portion of a council meeting for criticizing the council for violating the Open Meetings Act. Foster’s crime? Publicly stating that Jones’ rights were being violated. As part of the “State of Emergency”, the Council has decreed that it can meet in secret and all public comment has been suspended.

Does this sound like déjà vu, or what? When Dear Mister Mayor Man Tom Gorman ousted then-Mayor Nikkel, he then got the council to agree to blackout the public comment portion of the the council meetings. The rationale used was that there were “troublemakers” by the names of Joel Rabin and Sharon Hurst, who, through their public criticism of the city and its violation of laws such as the Open Meetings Act were trying to foment unrest and violence. Yes, a couple that gets senior citizen discounts are radicals that will disturb the peace – imagine that!

What is so ironic about the situation in Oklahoma and Arizona is that these are the two reddest states in the union, two states where the politicians love to claim that they are pro-Constitution and yet are so willing to remove the most basic right, the right to seek redress from the government. All of the fascists need to read two documents very closely – “The Declaration of Independence” and the “U.S. Constitution”. Both documents, views which the Founding Fathers held dear and fought and died for, clearly state the we, the governed, have every right to criticize our government when our government is doing things wrong. The government is not for, and should never be for, some elite who think it is their God-given right to govern because of their family or wealth or fame; no the government should be of, and for, the people, the commoner. We fought a bloody revolution and and even bloodier civil war to establish, once and for all, that all of us are equal, and that each and every one of us is the equal of each and every one else, regardless of race, creed, heritage, wealth, or family. We fought two wars on our own soil, against our own neighbors and brethren, to establish, once and for all, the triumph of egalitarianism and capitalism over nepotism, feudalism, and aristocracy.

Here is a link to the story about the shenanigans in Arizona:

http://news.yahoo.com/arizona-town-disarray-mayor-alleges-corruption-012411346.html

Posted in Aaarrgh, Bartlesville, News, Oklahoma, Politics | No Comments »

Some Like It Hot; I Do Not!

July 12th, 2011

Sunday it was 109 degrees. Around 3:15 PM, during the hottest part of the day, I was glazing a window in the shady back side of the house. Suddenly, I heard a loud “CRACK!” Then my daughter peeked her head out of the back door and asked me what I did, because the power went out. Well, I was glazing a window, and that doesn’t cause power outages. So, Number 6 and I walked down the street to see what happened, and there it was – one of the arms holding up some of the lines spontaneously broke, and those lines fell on the lines below, shorting the whole thing out.

I did the best I could to maintain the cool inside the house, but eventually nature won, and so I had to open up all the windows. Yes, there was a breeze, but it was a blast-furnace hot breeze. So, not having any power, and not having anything to do, we took refuge in the basement, where it was comfortable. And we actually spent time as a family!

About three hours after the power went off, it came back on, the air conditioner kicked back on, and I closed the windows. As the evening progressed, I noticed that it was still, well, stifling in the house, and checked on the outside unit of my 21 year-old central air conditioning system. It wasn’t working!

Sunday night was a mighty hot night, with just the two window units struggling mightily to keep us cool. My daughter finally conceded to the heat, and went and slept on the love-seat in the basement with the cat. The boys slept in a few of clothes as possible. Victoria sprawled out on the bed to maximize her exposure to the window unit in our bedroom, and I, wanting my own share of the cool, stretched out on the floor by the bed.

It was so miserable Monday morning, I broke out into a sweat just getting dressed. The thermometer attached to the thermostat said it was 80 degrees, but the humidity was smothering. I had decided the night before to buy another window unit, and I had a nightmare that I went to Lowe’s and they didn’t have a single air conditioner left. To make sure that that nightmare did not become reality, I went to Lowe’s at 730 in the morning to make sure I was the first in line to buy an air conditioner. They had smaller ones, so I bought two.

It is different having window units when you are used to having central air, and they have been earning their keep. There may be some warmer zones in the house now, but the cooler zones are cool, and that is good enough for me!

Posted in Aaarrgh, Bartlesville, Life, Oklahoma | No Comments »

I’ll Die Of Heat Stroke Before I Give Up My Casino!

July 11th, 2011

I was driving down Riverside Parkway in Tulsa around 3 PM this afternoon. It was hot, very hot, oh about 105 degrees hot. The air conditioning in my car was struggling to keep me not so much cool, but not hot. As I approached the signal at 81st Street, I saw in the right lane a vehicle with a young woman in it sitting at the light. It was kind of a junker, and it had no air conditioning. I felt sorry for the poor woman, as I know how miserable it is to drive around the city with no air conditioning in triple digit heat. The light turned green, and my lane started moving, and I noticed in front of the first junker another junker with a young woman driver and this vehicle, like the first, had no air conditioning. Now the air conditioning in my city-issued Ford Taurus is sorely lacking, to say the least, but as I passed the second car, I was thankful that I had it. Over the next few blocks, the two cars passed me, as their lane was moving faster than mine. Then, they turned, and whatever sympathy I had turned to disgust. Yup! You guessed it! They turned into the casino!

Now, if people want to gamble, that is their business, but I value each and every dollar I have, so throwing my money away in a casino is not for me. What I don’t understand is this – how people who are driving around in dangerous 105 degree heat and humidity with no air conditioning, and risking heat stroke by doing it, could throw their money away at a casino instaed of saving their casino money to get their air conditioning fixed. I am sorry, but death by heat is not a price I am wiling to pay to gamble. I think what annoys me even more is that these idiots will probably get some heat-related illness and then whip out their Medicaid card when they have to go to the ER to get treated for it. You and I and all the other taxpaying chumps are paying for these people to gamble in the middle of the day!

There’s a reason why a lot a poor people are poor – they make bad choices. And I don’t feel a bit sorry for them!

Posted in Aaarrgh, Life, Oklahoma, Tulsa | No Comments »

Council = Children

July 8th, 2011

Just over two weeks ago, I went before the Bartlesville City Council and told them that motorist safety is too important to trust to a committee made up of non-traffic professionals. Traffic engineering is one of those few professions where if we screw up, people die. Your concrete guy can use the wrong slump in the mix, but it is highly unlikely that someone will die because of it. Us traffic folk, if we put down the wrong color striping, or use the wrong sign, or don’t use any signs, or wire a signal wrong, motorists have accidents and people die. We take are jobs very, very seriously.

The City of Tulsa, for example, has six professional engineers on staff, none under the age of 30, meaning the youngest of us still has ten years experience. Collectively, that number is around 100 years of experience. Not to mention the decades of experience of our sign crews, our striping crews, and our signal crews. Even with the hundreds of years of collective experience, mistakes are still made. Such as 93th Street.

Of course, according to the Bartlesville City Council, I am a moron and don’t know what I am talking about. How else can you explain the unanimous vote to appoint no members, yes zero, to the new Street and Traffic Committee who actually have traffic and engineering experience? It’s like when I talk to my kids, tell them something, they look at me like I am an idiot who just fell off the turnip truck, blow me off, and then don’t understand why it blew up in their faces. Yes, the Bartlesville City Council is the equivalent of my children. Of course, the only difference is my children ARE CHILDREN and they are not responsibility for ensuring the public’s safety and well-being. If my kids mess up, no one will die.

Posted in Aaarrgh, Bartlesville, Engineering, Oklahoma, Politics | No Comments »

Can You Say Hypocrite, Mister Mayor Man?

July 8th, 2011

Not so long ago, the was a mayor of Bartlesville by the name of Ron Nikkel. Now Ron’s wife got sick, and he had to miss a meeting or two to tend to her. Now you’d think it would be a very honorable thing to do for a husband to forgo a meeting to care for his sick wife, right? You’d think. You’d think Ron would have been applauded for being a good husband and putting his wife as his highest priority. You’d think. But, he wasn’t. Instead, he was vilified and ridiculed and accused of malfeasance and shirking his mayoral duties, because in Bartlesville, the difference between the Mayor and the other four members of the council is that the Mayor presides over the meetings. Mayor Nikkel’s actions in tending to his sick wife was so outrageous that three of the members of the Council staged a coup d’état against him, stripping him of the position and giving it to the leader of the coup, none other than our current Mayor, Tom Gorman. So, Tom Gorman led a coup against Ron Nikkel because he missed a meeting or two, oh and didn’t wear a tie. Tom Gorman is a hypocrite.

Since winning reelection on April 5, our Dear Mister Mayor Man, Tom Gorman, has missed two out of the seven meetings, which means he has only attended 71 percent of the meetings. Under grading standards when I was a kid, that would be a D-. (Under today’s standards, it would be a C-). Also, I’ve noticed that Dear Mister Mayor Man doesn’t always don a tie! Shame! Shame! Shame! Dear Mister Mayor Man, you publicly chastised Ron Nikkel for missing meetings and not wearing a tie, and you do the exact same thing! What- now the rules you crammed down his throat shouldn’t apply to you?

I think that the Council should stage a coup d’état against Mr. Gorman, just like he did against Ron Nikkel, and strip him of his Mayoralty. Of course, it will never happen, but it should!

Posted in Aaarrgh, Bartlesville, Oklahoma, Politics | No Comments »

Why I Hate Fireworks….

July 5th, 2011

1. They are just plain loud. They set off car alarms, cause dogs to bark, wake up sleeping babies….

2. People act like morons when shooting them off. When I was a boy, we’d take the sticks off bottle rockets, and watch the little boogers chase people around. We’d fire them at each other and at things, because it’s cool to see things blow up. Of course, it’s not cool to see your things get blown up. They had a tragedy just outside Skiatook with fireworks, where a 20 year old newlywed lit the fireworks, then bent over them, and they struck him in his throat. He died from his wounds.

3. Once you’ve seen one, you’ve pretty much seen them all. I’ve seen many many fireworks displays in my 45 years on this planet, and they pretty much look the same. There are only a limited amount of variation in fireworks – you got your red ones, you got your blue ones, you got your whistlers, your screamers, and your boomers, and combinations of sound and color. That’s about it.

4. People are obnoxious. When I lived in Texas, they shot the fireworks off from behind my house. The first year, people parked in the right-of-way right behind my house, right-of-way that I, not the city, maintained. They peed on it. They threw trash on it. They teased my dogs. I vowed never again. The next year I coned off the area and parked my vehicles in it. The year after that, I made a giant American flag out of streamers. The year after that, I made a war memorial. I don’t go to fireworks shows because I don’t want have to deal with the rude idiots in the crowd.

5. The laws don’t apply to me. It is illegal to shoot some types, if not all types, of fireworks off in most cities, Bartlesville included. That didn’t matter. I had to hear people shooting off the damned things for three days, well into the night as well. As I heard someone comment on the radio this morning, the next time they are going to take a bunch of fireworks and fire them at the neighbors’ house at 2 AM and see how the neighbors’ like it.

6. We didn’t shoot off fireworks in 1776. We did, however, fire muskets, and lots of them. And rang bells. And the real Independence Day, the day the Declaration was adopted by the Congress, was July 2. It just took a couple of days to edit, sign, and announce.

Posted in Aaarrgh, Bartlesville, Life, Oklahoma | 1 Comment »

Every Driver Thinks He Is A Traffic Expert

June 29th, 2011

One of the issues in my campaign was abolishing most of the committees of the City of Bartlesville, which I see as useless and detrimental to the operation of the city. These committees are filled with political hacks of the council, and are given the authority to oversee the operations of the city. The two that most annoyed me were the Traffic Committee the Streets Committee, who were vested with making engineering decisions, such as traffic control and determining what streets get fixed. If you are going to have these committees, then what is the point of having a City Engineer, other than having a puppet to legitimize the shenanigans.

At the last council meeting, the council decided to abolish these two committees. Great! Except they replaced it with one committee, the Streets and Traffic Committee, made up of seven lucky citizens. Now, instead of having 14 political hacks making life-and-death engineering decisions, there are only seven. Lucky us!

Being a traffic engineer, I get rather annoyed when members of the public and the politicians think they know my job better than I do just because they have a driver’s license. News flash – there isn’t a single idea that these non-traffic folks have come up with that those of us inside the profession haven’t already come up with and vetted. Every traffic control device, every sign, every stripe, every color, every word, has a specific meaning and application, and when you don’t understand that and misuse traffic control devices, people get hurt and die. And what does a non-engineer really know about, say pavement materials, or sign materials, or pavement marking materials, or about performance of materials, and when each type should be used? Government agencies spend billions of dollars maintaining are roads, and to give control of these dollars to people who are basically clueless is a travesty.

I did a search of the registry of the Oklahoma Board of Engineers, and discovered that there are, count them, seventy-one registered professional engineers within the City of Bartlesville; there are seventy-one men and women who would actually be qualified to sit on an engineering oversight committee. How many of these engineers were appointed? You guessed it! A big fat zero!

The tragedy of the situation is that someone WILL get seriously injured or killed on the streets of Bartlesville as a result of substandard streets and traffic control devices, and there is absolutely no excuse for that given the large pool of talent available to serve. Ah, but it’s always about politics and cronyism, isn’t it? Who cares if people die as long as Mister Mayor Man Tom Gorman and his cronies control the public purse. Sad.