SPORTS: Water Thrills
Wakeboarding is a beast of wild origins — a hybrid of waterskiing, snowboarding and surfing bred in crystal blue waters off the coast of Australia in the ’80s. The extreme sport features dizzying spins and gravity-defying stunts at thrilling heights while the rider is pulled across the water by a speedboat, and it’s more than…
Read More >ARTS: “Oklahoma Kid”
Fourth-generation Wild West showman Marty Tipton, aka “The Oklahoma Kid,” carries on the family business with style. The trick-roper and professional cowboy has performed thousands of shows across the nation, adding his own chapter to his storied pedigree with his sharp wit and a unique message. “It’s not always how fast you run in life,…
Read More >SPORTS: Semi-Pro
Veteran college football coach Brian Kelly has set his sights on the Oklahoma City Diamondbacks, a semi-professional football team with a promising future and several Edmond players on the roster. The season kicked off March 3, with early wins perhaps setting a template for a successful 2012 for the team. “We kind of have an…
Read More >The Art of Manliness
Teddy Roosevelt. Atticus Finch. Ron Swanson. These men embody the kind of masculinity that Brett McKay and his wife, Kate, try to examine with artofmanliness.com, a blog dedicated to uncovering the lost art of being a man. Brett grew up in Edmond and graduated from Edmond North High School in 2001. He started the blog…
Read More >ARTS: Adrenaline Rush
Getting married is difficult enough without fretting over minutia; that’s the territory of Justin Lawrence’s company, Adrenaline Entertainment. Lawrence wanted to offer brides a complete wedding solution so his company offers DJs, videographers and photographers. But this isn’t new territory for Lawrence. He started out as a DJ for fraternity and sorority date parties in…
Read More >SPORTS: Zabel’s Tug
College and professional sports programs across the nation have found a new way to build strong, unstoppable players, and the key is an invention by Edmond resident and former football star Steve Zabel. “The Tug” is filled with water and it uses inertia to offer a new spin on the millennia-old game tug-of-war. Disc-shaped and…
Read More >Stop-Motion
Not long ago, a telephone was just a device that let you talk to someone who was beyond shouting range. A few waves of advancement later, many of us carry movie-quality video cameras (that also happen to make phone calls) in our pockets. Coupled with the advent of YouTube, for the first time in history,…
Read More >SPORTS: The Puck Stops Here
It’s no surprise to hear of a local sports star going pro. Oklahoma grows tremendous athletes — people who rack up gold medals and win national championships — and Oklahomans love hometown heroes who achieve the international spotlight. However, when Edmond native Matt Donovan was drafted to a professional league in 2009, he made history….
Read More >ARTS: Dr. Pants
It was a collision of technology, timing, and soda — or so Dr. Pants’ drummer Dustin Ragland explains one of the band’s many offbeat ambitions. The song was “Sarsaparilla Girl” and the video was hoped to be the first in the world shot entirely with the iPhone 4. Local filmmaker Kyle Roberts hatched the idea…
Read More >Sports: Mark Bravo
How you identify a glass of water, as half-empty or half-full, is said to determine whether you are a pessimist or an optimist. Someone who considers his life to be like a glass half-empty might feel overwhelmed or even depressed, focusing on what he doesn’t have, while someone who looks at life as a glass…
Read More >Arts: Glasswork…By The Slice
Have you ever seen art created from the comfort of a pizzeria table? Most likely you haven’t. But that’s all about to change. Fifteen years ago, Chris McGahan and his wife, Linda, set out on a new adventure: opening a tiny pizza shop called Italian Jim’s. Before they knew it, repeat customers were driving dozens…
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