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We went to see “The Fantasticks” again last weekend, this time at the OKC Repertory Theatre company.  The company was pretty good, and of course the material itself is phenomenal. I was again marveled at the depth of insight contained in this script.

If you’ve never heard of The Fantasticks, it is the longest running musical theatre production of all time. I believe it has run for something like 42 years in New York. When you see it, you can understand why because its story is a metaphor about innocence versus experience that is timeless, ageless and universal.

Here are the lyrics to the production’s opening and closing song, “Try to Remember” (emphasis mine). Consider these and you’ll see what I mean:

Try to remember the kind of September
When life was slow and oh, so mellow.
Try to remember the kind of September
When grass was green and grain was yellow.
Try to remember the kind of September
When you were a tender and callow fellow.
Try to remember, and if you remember,
Then follow.

(Follow, follow, follow, follow, follow,
Follow, follow, follow, follow)

Try to remember when life was so tender
That no one wept except the willow.
Try to remember when life was so tender
That dreams were kept beside your pillow.
Try to remember when life was so tender
That love was an ember about to billow.
Try to remember, and if you remember,
Then follow.

(Follow, follow, follow, follow, follow,
Follow, follow, follow, follow)

Deep in December, it’s nice to remember,
Although you know the snow will follow.
Deep in December, it’s nice to remember,
Without a hurt the heart is hollow.
Deep in December, it’s nice to remember,
The fire of September that made us mellow.
Deep in December, our hearts should remember
And follow.

I built EatAroundOKC.com about a year ago as a place to post my very own reviews about Oklahoma City Restaurants. It was sort of a learning lab for me as it was the first website I ever designed and cutup with XHTML/CSS. Also, it was the first site I ever integrated onto Wordpress. Well, in fact, it was the first time I ever used Wordpress, or any blogging software for that matter.

Anyway, I had high hopes of writing lots of restaurant reviews about Oklahoma City restaurants. I got a few up there, and then a whole lot of months passed by without a single post.

But recently, my friend Andrew starting writing about Oklahoma City restaurants on a blogger blog he set up. I found his articles to be quite entertaining, and I asked him if he would like to post them on EatAroundOKC instead because, after all, he could be hugely famous this way since my site is so well known. Anyway, he agreed and so with renewed enthusiasm we bring you the all new and improved EatAroundOKC.com, your guide to restaurants in Oklahoma City, at least the ones where we’ve eaten.

What is new and improved you might ask? Well, primarily the fact that there will (hopefully) be regular posts now. We’ve even started a new monthly series — the “Shady restaurant of the month.” I’ll be refraining from posting any restaurant reviews here on DailyGenesis in lieu of putting them up over at the new site. In fact, you’ll probably notice a few from the DG archives being ported over to EatAroundOKC. Please subscribe to EatAroundOKC so you can keep up with everything.

We’re also opening it up to outside reviewers. We’d love to find some other Oklahoma City people who like to eat and like to write and would submit articles to help build up our restaurant portfolio. They, too, can be made famous if we choose to publish them on EatAroundOKC.

So help us spread the word. It’s not like we’re going to make any money off of this, but it is a fun little project and I think it could be a handy resource for Oklahoma City. My goal is simply that one day, some restaurant somewhere will comp us a meal in order to get us to write about them. Then, it will all be worth it.

Ok, my last post pointed out that the first Chipotle in Oklahoma will be opening soon in Tulsa. But Ben pointed out in the comments that he had already seen a Chipotle sign along Broadway in Edmond. When I heard that, I had to check it out immediately.

He’s right! There is a small Chipotle sign on a lot at the SW corner of 15th and Broadway in Edmond, just south of the Starbucks. It’s a little strip mall that looks to me to be about 75% complete, not counting time for internal buildout. Looks like Chipotle will be sharing the building with an AT&T store and a few other, smaller, retailers. I didn’t have my camera with me or I would have shared a picture (darn!).

So, Chipotle’s logo is alive and well in the metro area. I must admit, I’m a bit disappointed that Edmond gets the first one. Well, let’s step back — I’m disappointed that Tulsa gets the first one in Oklahoma and also that Edmond gets the first one in the metro area. But you know what, I’ll take it. The Edmond location is a mere 20 minutes from my house. When I lived in Houston, the closest Chipotle was 25 minutes away if traffic was good, and we made the drive quite frequently.

Of course, there’s no word on when this Edmond location will be opening, but my best guess is early 2008. Hopefully very early indeed!

Ok, if you don’t already know how much I love Chipotle, please read this to get the full understanding.

So, currently the closest Chipotle restaurants to Oklahoma City are in Witchita, KS.  There are three of them there, at around 154 miles away. 

Just slightly farther out are the multitude of them lining the North side of Dallas, even one in Denton proper.  These ring in at about 160-170 miles out.  Of course, I frequent these most often as I rarely have any reason to go to Witchita.

But, if you had been paying close attention to the Chipotle website over the past year, you would have noticed that both Tulsa and Oklahoma City had pins in them on the “future development” map they used to have up (the map has now been removed).  No further info was given.  Just a couple of pins showing that they did indeed have the intent to build here.

And if you’ve paid even closer attention over the past couple of months, you may have taken a look at the Chipotle job boards where you would have seen jobs advertised in Tulsa, indicating that a restaurant opening is just right around the bend.

Well, now we’ve a location.  It’s not open yet, but 10902 E.71st St. in Tulsa is about to become the closest Chipotle to OKC at a mere 100 miles away, cutting almost an hour off of the gulf separating Oklahoma City from all kinds of tasty.

Not quite close enough to accommodate lunch hours though, so we can only hope that an OKC location will be coming quite soon. 

Today, I am beginning my first blogging series. This is a topic I have wanted to discuss for a while and I believe my thoughts will extend beyond a single post.

I believe that most believers would agree that sin is not a laughing matter. We don’t laugh about most sins. You know, the bad ones like murder and stealing and adultery. Those are serious sins, right?

There is one sin, though, that I notice people tend to joke about regularly. That sin is … are you ready … wait for it …

Gluttony

How many times do you see someone sit down in front of a big plate of terribly unhealthy food and joke about how unhealthy it is? We say things like “man, this is a heart attack on a plate,” or “boy, I really shouldn’t be eating this.” Then, of course, we go right ahead and eat it all.

I know I am just giving a few examples but my point here is that, in general, a lot of people laugh about the fact that they are doing something that’s wrong. It just seems that we don’t take the matter very seriously.

I guess I really got motivated to start up this series when I read this post from the About Oklahoma City blog. Evidently, I am living in one of the most unfit and unhealthy cities in the nation where obesity is rising and things are just all around bad.

Obesity is a problem, but that’s really not what I want to focus on in this series. I think the bigger issue is self-control and moderation, because that’s the problem I see with gluttony. It’s certainly detrimental to one’s health, but it’s even more detrimental to one’s spirit as it is evidence of a lack of self-control. And I think that we all need to be more disciplined and have more self-control, regardless of our waist size.

I want to be clear that I’m talking to myself just as I’m talking to everyone else. I personally struggle with this issue a great deal and that’s why I feel it is so important. People often look at me and say “you’re so skinny, you don’t need to watch what you eat.” I think that is just more evidence of the problem, because you don’t have to be really large to struggle with self control.

I love to eat. Eating makes me feel good and so when I feel bad I often want to eat for comfort. I go beyond eating enough to be filled and move into eating just because it tastes good or feels good. Every time I work hard at eating right, there is huge temptation to not eat right. Why is it so hard? How do we overcome it?

Well, I think the first step is to acknowledge that it’s a problem and, unfortunately, I think that’s the step where most of us fail. After all, if we joke about it or laugh about it, we are not taking it very seriously. It’s as if we are saying we know it is something we should do, but we don’t think it’s that big of a deal so we’re not going to work hard at it.

I guess that’s really the point of post number one. There will be more on this topic to come.

I use gmail on my own domain for my personal email running on dailygenesis.com.  At Element Fusion, we also use gmail for our company’s email solution.  So, needless to say, I am a big gmail user.

However, I’m not one of these guys who digs into every feature and facet of an application right off the bat.  I’d rather just figure things out as I go along, which probably costs me a good deal of productivity in the long run, but oh well.  So, anyway, I’ve never archived a single email message in gmail ever — until now.

I figured, “why archive?”  I mean, I can just keep everything in the inbox and search for what I need, right?  Why take that extra step of clicking the “archive” button.  Seems like a waste to me.

But, I finally found a good reason.  You see, when I have emails that represent things I need to respond to or things I need to do, I need a way to keep those in front of me.  Now, I could star them or label them, but that doesn’t make them pop out at me, so I prefer to mark them as “unread”.  That way, they look very different in the box.  But, here’s the problem.  Gmail doesn’t have a way (at least that I’ve found) to show only the unread messages in your inbox.  If you know of a way to do this, please let me know because it is this, and this alone, that has led me to get into archiving.

That said, now that I’ve started archiving, I’m not sure I can go back. Once I got the 5,000+ messages sent over to “all mail,” I was left with just the “unread” messages awaiting my attention in my inbox.  I marked them as read (which I can do now, since they are the only messages in my inbox), and there is something pretty satisfying about not having any “unread” messages.  It’s somehow more peaceful.  Also, there’s something nice about “archiving” a message when you are finished with it, as if to say, “farewell, message, I have no need of you anymore.”

So, I’m not sure that I’d go back, even if there is a way to view only the unread messages, which I’m pretty sure there is not and I can’t for the life of me figure out why.

Why do people say “no pun intended” when, clearly, they do intend to make a pun. This happens a lot, but here’s a specific example I came across while reading a Seth Godin book:

“What about a Polaroid camera? Was your first exposure (no pun intended!) in a TV ad, or did you discover it when a friend showed you how cool the idea of an instant photograph was?”

– Seth Godin, Unleashing the Ideavirus

So, are we supposed to believe that Seth Godin was just typing along one day and happened to spit out that clever pun unintentionally, realized the crazy irony in what he just typed and therefore wanted to let us know that he didn’t really intend to make that pun, it just slipped out? Not likely.

It seems to me that the reason to say “no pun intended” is if you really didn’t intend to make a pun. This would seem to happen a lot more in speaking than in writing. If you are just talking in conversation and you happen to say something that you think back on and realize it was a pun, then that’s when you say “no pun intended.” You don’t say “no pun intended” when you did intend to make a pun.

Ok, enough said.

The capo often gets some flack amongst higher-end musicians and I think it’s about time someone came to its defense. The anti-capo argument often goes a little something like this:

“Why do you need a capo? Why not just learn to play in all of the keys?”

Makes sense, right? Well, only if you believe the capo’s sole job is transposition. What many who make this argument fail to appreciate, I think, is that use of the capo is often just as much about voicing and tone as it is about changing keys.

I am not a very good acoustic guitar player, but I can play in all of the keys. That’s because I know how to play bar chords which make it pretty simple to hammer out major and minor triads on pretty much any pitch. So, why use a capo? Because I am compelled by voicing.

Ask a piano player to play a G chord and you might get any number of results. Maybe a triad. Maybe four notes in each hand. Maybe adding the “2″ and leaving out the “3″. Pianists can make a G chord sound many different ways by the way they voice the chord.

Guitarists also like to have these voicing options, but the configuration of fingers on frets is a bit limiting. Like playing twister with your fingers, there are only so many different ways you can approach the neck without hurting yourself. So, what’s a guitarist to do? Well, some venture out into alternate tunings to provide some voicing variety. Others use capos. Some even use multiple capos in various configurations. In all cases, a guitarist is not simply cheating his way into a difficult key, but rather creating new ways to sound the chords.

One specific example revolves around open voicing chords. An open voicing chord is one in which at least one string on the guitar is left “open” and not fretted. Naturally you can see how an open voicing can only work on a single pitch since trying to move up and down the fretboard while leaving one or more strings open doesn’t work too well. That is, unless you use a capo. So, if you like the sound of the open voicing G but you want to play the song in B flat, then put a capo on fret three and listen to it ring.

I believe the capo is an absolutely essential accessory for the acoustic guitar. Just like a mute provides a brass player with a whole new world of tone possibilities, the capo does the same for the guitarist. And hey, sometimes brass players might just use the mute because they are not good enough to play soft without it. In the same way, acoustic players (including me) might sometimes use a capo to cheat into a difficult key.  Even so, mutes are still viable tools for brass instruments and capos are equally significant for the guitar.

Please note: this article has been republished on EatAroundOKC.com. Please follow this link to see the article:

“Oklahoma City goes ultra-hip with Red Prime Steak“

This year, through my job at Element Fusion, I’ve proposed two panels for the South by Southwest interactive conference in 2008. SXSW is a major conference in Austin focusing on Music, Film and Interactive.

The proposals are posted, along with all of the other submissions, on the SXSW panel picker, which allows anyone to register and vote on which panels they would like to see.

So, if you are so inclined, why not head on over there and give us a vote? Just click the panel picker link above and then search for “element fusion” in the search box and our two proposals should come up.

To read my post about this on the Element Fusion blog, click here.