By Sheridan on 10/6/2008 8:22 PM

It has been a little more than a week since the fatal shooting of 25-year-old Marcell Johnson by LPD Officer Luis Pagan after a nighttime traffic stop. These facts are known. Johnson tried momentarily to flee the traffic stop but finally stopped. Some cocaine was found in his car, but no weapon. Johnson was shot in the neck and chest and died at the hospital. Given the absence of a weapon, it is easy to say that Officer Pagan was never in danger, but we also remember that Nik Green stopped and u ... Read More »

By Sheridan on 9/23/2008 2:43 PM

So, we're painting a crosswalk from Memorial Hospital across Gore Boulevard so that the daily exodus of nurses who prefer Subway to the hospital cafeteria are less likely to get run over. Good idea.
Doing it in the middle of the day. Bad idea. Have you ever noticed that many cities do streetwork at night so as to avoid the sort of congestion we're seeing in the Cameron area, which is arguably to worst traffic area in Lawton? A little 1 a.m. work might be healthier for city crews than ... Read More »

By Sheridan on 8/10/2008 5:13 PM

NBC has promised thousands of hours of Olympic coverage on 6+ networks. But not so in Lawton. First of all, two of the networks, Oxygen (a women's entertainment channel) and MSNBC are not available at all on Fidelity Cable (formerly Lawton Cablevision). Keep in mind, this is the only town I've ever seen that didn't have MSNBC. But alas, even the coverage on CNBC is shockingly unavailable in Lawton. It seems that CNBC is playing normal financial shows on a feed for cable companies who do ... Read More »

By Sheridan on 7/18/2008 5:14 PM

This is unofficial, but the Seattle Times has a map showing the rumored closings. seattletimes.nwsource.com/flatpages/businesstechnology/
locationsofstarbucksstoresclosingacrossthenation.html

It shows the Sheridan Road location as closing as well as the Altus location. These make sense, as Starbucks has s ... Read More »

By Sheridan on 7/16/2008 9:50 PM

Longtime KSWO chief meteorologist Pat Walker is blowing out of town, making an interesting move to Independent News Network, a shop in Davenport,Iowa that creates news content for TV stations in small cities that can't afford a full newsroom. In an industry of tornado chasing blowhards (see Eric Law), Walker was a fresh breeze of understatement.

Replacing him will be David Baxley, an Alabamian who leaves WAKA in Montgomery, a larger market, to come to Lawton. I wonde ... Read More »

By Sheridan on 7/2/2008 2:33 PM

So Starbucks announced that it is closing 600 underperforming stores that opened in the last two years. That no doubt sent shockwaves up my spine. You don't know how serious some of us here in the catacombs are about our caffeine. That said, on the positive side for Lawton, most of the stores to close will be located near other Starbucks according to a corporate statement. Our new Starbucks location is indeed not very far from the Cache Road location. On the other hand, urbanites know t ... Read More »

By Sheridan on 5/23/2008 4:58 PM

Have you seen the workers at Ramada Inn on 2nd Avenue busily adding a new facade? Ten will get you 20 that they're not doing much to the interior. Hmm. I wonder why Ramada would update the exterior. It wouldn't have anything to do with Lawton's urban renewal plans, calling for the motel to be bought out and converted for the multi-use, residential retail (read Target store) development city planners have in mind, would it? The owners probably think they can shake an extra $50K out of th ... Read More »

By Sheridan on 5/8/2008 9:39 PM

If you have a death wish, or are hoping for a rear ender to earn an insurance payday on your clunker, try driving up and down North Sheridan in the northbound lanes. Not only is street construction limiting you to one lane near the critical turn into Wal-Mart, now that the new Carl's Jr. is open, there is also traffic exiting and entering just beyond the traffic cones, creating all sorts of peril. It has long amazed me someone hasn't been killed pulling into Wal-Mart. You'll note that t ... Read More »

By Sheridan on 3/29/2008 8:39 PM

So Lawton now is home to a professional sports championship. After dispatching teams from such larger cities as Atlanta and Albany, New York throughout the season and beating the similarly sized city of Yakima (though the team is named YakAMA in an evident homage to Barack ObAMA) the Oklahoma Cavalry (the team is now renamed Lawton-Ft. Sill, in an evident homage to Lawton-Ft. Sill) beat a team from a city a third the size of Lawton. Minot, North Dakota, pop. 37,000, is almost exactly th ... Read More »

By Sheridan on 3/6/2008 10:33 PM

Let's see, yesterday there was an 80 percent chance of snow today and the forecast was for 3 to 5 inches. Then it was for 1 to 3 inches. Then it was for at least an inch. Now Skippy (Dan Zarrow) has the audacity to say it was TOO WARM to snow. Hey Skippy, it didn't even RAIN!!! (By the way, I was once told that exclamation points are substitutes for poor vocabulary, so there you have it) Can anyone count the number of times we've had snow forecast that didn't happen? Why don't they just ... Read More »