Bio

I grew up in Enid, OK and went to the University of Oklahoma.  I am a gastroenterologist in Tulsa.


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Matt Blankenship
October 10, 2012
Matt Blankenship
September 11, 2012
Matt Blankenship
August 30, 2012
Matt Blankenship
August 28, 2012
Matt Blankenship
August 25, 2012
Matt Blankenship
August 17, 2012
Matt Blankenship
August 13, 2012
Display starting at 23 of 23 user conversations

Matt's Profile

Matt
Name:
Matt
Hometown:
Tulsa, OK
Joined:
Apr 10, 2011

Recent Comments

Matt Blankenship
Indaba: So what was your favourite poem in the 101 anthology? Was that by Ted Hughes? He did a great audio tape. · 2 hours ago

It is a small book published in the '20s and edited by a man named Roy J. Cook.  It contains mostly the standard classics of English and American poetry from the 19th and early 20th centuries.  A personal favorite is "Sea Fever" by John Masefield.  There's plenty in there by "lesser" poets, but as a professor once told me, we spend so much time talking about great books, we sometimes neglect what we can get from very good books.  It's the same with poems--this is a book full of very good traditional poems that we all should be familiar with.  And it wouldn't hurt to memorize a few.   Others included are Henry van Dyke, Kipling, Kilmer ("Trees"), and many more.

Matt Blankenship
DocJay: If you get a Super Black Eagle 2, 12 guage it will hunt anything you want and shoot like mad with minimal maintenance. A good clays/skeet gun. You'll never regret that weapon but over/unders are pretty. Glad to see you're happy. The recent schadenfreude has lifted my spirits. OKC was doomed once RW went down. This could have been the year too. As far as Ricochet, the gang of interesting intellectuals has grown in number. Regarding your conversion, I congratulate you on following the path Christ has led you. You have done right by your family as well. · 6 hours ago

My 20 ga is  Benelli Montefeltro, and I do love it.  It is a sweet little gun, and for a beginner I'm surpisingly good with it (mostly shooting an informal 5-stand).  But since I already have a Benelli semi-auto, I doubt I'll get another now.  It's really more about the look and feel of a nice traditional O/U. 

And yes, I knew they were doomed without Westbrook.  I was just hoping they'd make the conference finals.

Matt Blankenship

flownover: Six months....I am impressed. 

Are you sure there's a time limit to your sabbatical or has the intensity of recent news drawn you back ? · 14 minutes ago

I think that is part of it.

Matt Blankenship

I like the scene in Wayne's World where Wayne starts playing the opening riff of Stairway to Heaven in the music store and the clerk stops him and points to a sign that says "No Stairway to Heaven."  Most--not all--of the overplayed songs mentioned here have in common that they are great rock or pop songs to start, then they get overplayed.  Does anyone not think that Brown Eyed Girl is a great song?  Or Hotel California?  Or American Pie?  Or Margaritaville?  These are all really good songs that have been murdered and turned into pitiful cliches just by having been played to death.  

And another second to the Beatles defenders.  Especially Rubber Soul, which oddly enough has few if any overplayed songs on it.  The closest would be In My LIfe, I suppose.  Otherwise it all melts together seamlessly as an early concept album.  See also the Beach Boys' response, Pet Sounds, which also has no overplayed cliches.  And another second to to Heroes and Villains, and all of Smile, really.

Matt Blankenship

ConservativeWanderer

 

I think you can pick that up from the demeanor of the two campaigns.

Who looks confident, and who looks desperate? · 22 minutes ago

I hope you are right.  I just play around with that electoral map on RCP, and even when I give Romney every state he should/must win (VA, NC, FL, CO, IA, even NH, etc) I am still stuck at 267.  That means he's got to have one of WI, OH, MI, PA, or NV.  And I just can't wrap my mind around a Republican winning any of those except Ohio, and Ohio is way too close for comfort. 

The whole thing is close, and it shouldn't be--as others above have said.  That's what's so vexing.  Look, I couldn't stand Clinton, Gore, Kerry,  or the Obama of 2008.  But I could understand how the casual apolitical centrist undecided moderate could vote for them.  This Obama, with this record...I just don't understand it.  The 30% of the country that is hard left/liberal, I get.  They're always going to vote for the Democrat.  But this should be a 57/43 election.

Matt Blankenship

Has anyone heard anything reliable on what the campaign internal polls are showing?  I know this is guarded info, but it seems like someone must know something.  I am desperate to feel a little better before Tuesday. 

Matt Blankenship

DocJay

Matt Blankenship

Squishy Blue RINO: The Sea, from the Life Nature Library really reinforced my love fo rthe ocean. · 1 hour ago

Ah, the Time Life series.  We had the Nature Library and the Science Library.  I read the volumes (or parts thereof)  on ships and planes and medicine and mathematics many times. We also had the Old West series.  I wore out the introductory volume: The Gunfighters.    

Dude, I read that cover to cover over ten times even though I had it memorized.  I still recall the kill totals of the outlaws etc.   · 6 minutes ago

Docjay: I still remember specific pages from that book.  There was a fold-out page that had a picture of a bunch of different guns.  The "tools of the trade," they called it.  I learned the word "deter" from that page.  As in, "deter a would-be foe with a sawed-off shotgun."  I didn't need to look it up. I learned it from context.

Matt Blankenship

Squishy Blue RINO: The Sea, from the Life Nature Library really reinforced my love fo rthe ocean. · 1 hour ago

Ah, the Time Life series.  We had the Nature Library and the Science Library.  I read the volumes (or parts thereof)  on ships and planes and medicine and mathematics many times. We also had the Old West series.  I wore out the introductory volume: The Gunfighters.    

Those family reference series are pretty much history in the age of the internet, don't you think?  Just like the family encyclopedia.  Kind of bittersweet.  I love Wikipedia, but there's nothing like having a bunch of interesting nonfiction/reference-type books lying around to peruse randomly.  I read way more of that kind of stuff as a kid than novels and stories. 

(I'm not making a value statement of one over the other here:  both kinds of reading are important for kids.  If anything, I regret not having read more fantasy/great fiction as a kid.)

Matt Blankenship

I second Encyclopedia Brown.  In fact, I started my own detective agency.  (I only got one case--never solved it.)  And of course, Sherlock Holmes.

I loved the Choose Your Own Adventure series, too

In my early teen years, I read Poe.  (One of my English professors pointed out that for many people, our serious adult reading begins with Poe.  I find this to be true.)

Later I read a lot of King, Clancy, and Crichton.

Edited on October 31, 2012 at 6:12pm
Matt Blankenship

I grew up in a house full of books.  The thing I remember the most vividly is sitting in my dad's study listening to him read "The Raven."  The room is dim and book lined, with an old ticking clock--a classic example of a man's private study.  To this day, when I think of Poe's "chamber" I think of that room. 

My personal reading in childhood tended more toward non-fiction.  Apollo Expeditions to the Moon, Modern Air Combat, Wings, my grandmother's copy of Courier and Ives Chronicles of America, her 1920s volumes of The Book of Popular Science all are vivid in my mind.  There was a wonderful 20 volume series of hardbacks published in about 1971 called The Pictorial Guide to American History.  I read the WWII volume and some of the volumes from the 1960s (covering the space program) over and over. 

As for fiction, I never could get off the ground with the great fantasty works of Tolkien and Lewis.  I only now am doing Narnia (reading to my kids).  And I am listening to The Hobbit via Audible.com.  I really missed something by not reading these in my childhood.

Edited on October 31, 2012 at 6:04pm
Matt Blankenship

He'll return to his native Kenya [:)], where he'll be eligible to serve as UN Secretary General.

Matt Blankenship

What about Batman, but instead of the camp 1960s approach, us the Nolan / Dark Knight approach. Really build Gotham as a believable universe.

Matt Blankenship

"It is but a scratch!"

Matt Blankenship

Any Bradbury.  M.R. James, Ghost Stories of an Antiquary.  And Henry James, The Turn of the Screw (the only Henry James I can read...)

I grew up on Poe.  And I second Washington Irving.  As Richard Brookhiser once said about The Legend of Sleepy Hollow:  "There are bigger stories in the world, but none that are better made."

Edited on October 16, 2012 at 5:19pm
Matt Blankenship

If you want to terrify your children, there's nothing better than the TailypoI remember seeing a storyteller tell that story in a cajun accent on a Saturday morning show when I was a kid, and I never forgot it.  I never saw the book or heard the story again--until a couple of weeks ago when I ran across it at a great indy children's bookstore in Kansas City (Reading Reptile, if you're ever in the area).  Anyway,

Tailypo, Tailypo,

Why'd you cut off my tailypo?

...you know, and I know,

that I'm here to get back  my tailypo...

Matt Blankenship

Crow's Nest: I have nodded in approval at many of the great recommendations so far.

If we're allowed to add autobiographies or letters from a particular period of life, some favorites include:

Marcus Aurelius's Meditations, Xenophon'sAnabasis, Wintston Chuchill's My Early Life, Montaigne's Essais(a most unusal memoir of sorts), Hilaire Belloc's Path to Rome, and Ben Franklin'sAutobiography· 6 minutes ago

A strong second to My Early Life and to Meditations.  Although, have you ever actually tried to live your life as a Stoic?  Who hasn't, after reading Aurelius, said, "Yes,  I'm going to live like that!"  William Hazlitt had some interesting thoughts on that.  Let's just say it's easier said than done. 

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