I don’t know any other way to say this, but some of the TV commercials on our Oklahoma City stations are just life shortening. Makes one feel like we’ve lived long enough. I hate to single any one of them out but will anyway as a public service. About two years ago some air conditioner place in OKC featured an advertisement featuring what I suppose is one of their star A/C technicians doing a rap commercial. I’ll just call it the “Do It” guy. He poses as a guy who is going to fix your A/C but the thing is you have to call him. So, he goes into his rap song of “Do It.” It’s pretty bad after you’ve seen it a few dozen times. Hope his A/C skills exceed his rap singing abilities.

I suppose this bad boy was inspired by the Jewelry Store commercial featuring a sort of seedy looking character with a long unkempt beard who is holding the reins of what must be an embarrassed horse. He is extolling the credit worthiness of anyone who doesn’t look like they rode with Jesse James. I won’t go into the Edmond Honda guys. I’m sort of like the embarrassed horse mentioned above. Now there is a newer one by a guy (Gary) from “Goober’s Furniture” which makes me as a pharmacist want to get him a bottle of laryngitis medicine. Thankfully, he hasn’t sung. Yet. Of course, the GMC pickup commercial drives me nuts! Two idiots going “clap-clap-pat” on their legs inside this selfdriving vehicle as it drives itself across a high-dangerous looking bridge over deep water.

I guess I get irritated easily. Channel 5 in OKC still can’t say the word Seminole. I guess this word is difficult for them. I had a relative, an immigrant from Indiana who called it, Sa-mo-lee. Channel 5’s weather guy calls it Sim-I-nile. But I think it’s called Sem-Inole. Channel 4 needs a keeper who goes around destroying old videos of uninteresting news after the first 150 times they ran it. And for Pete’s sake, can’t they give the deserving “good” people (pay it forward) more than $400 for being local heroes?

I suppose I shouldn’t be speaking about “lifeshortening” events, but I have to be careful at my age. I speak this just after returning from Stonewall where I attended the annual alumni meeting. The “smallish” crowd was mostly made up of old has-beens and so forth like me. Some of them sure were getting old.

Pat and I did get to see some old friends and fellow Longhorns and we did have an enjoyable time. But alas, no one showed up from the class of 1952 but me. Less than 50 alums showed up in total and we enjoyed pizza and finger foods while examining our past efforts to create a viable scholarship fund. We’ve done well on that. We have accomplished it with thousands of dollars going out each year in aid to our Longhorn college students. Bill Dulaney of Wynnewood (Class of 1949) does an excellent job of managing this investment and the fund is in the hundreds of thousands of dollars now.

Academic achievements at Stonewall were examined and we were all happy with the scholastic achievements of our “Longhorn” students. The school’s academic rankings continued to improve and that was for sure something for us to be proud of. Enrollments are up too in this sprawling school district too. My congratulations to an effective and aggressive school board and administration. This little town is completing its trip through Covid and in general rough times for small towns. Just like we have in Allen. During these hard times the Town of Stonewall put in a new water system and is trying to make several basic improvements in their infrastructure. Hope it all goes well for Stonewall.

Meanwhile, our infrastructure is solid here in Allen. Except perhaps for our streets. Our town aggressively works to keep our water and sewage systems up to par and I know we as citizens appreciate this. Thanks. And be sure and go to church on Sunday. Our town’s churches were whacked by Covid too.

Wayne Bullard, DPh cwaynebullard@gmail.com