On the night of May 13th, 2007, after my wife-at-the-time and I had our families over for a joint Mother's Day cookout, I was in the spare bedroom of my house listening to music, and putting the finishing touches on a snarky little blog post I had written about the Fox 25 weathermen for a new website I created. I was 29, had a decent-for-a-29-year-old corporate job, and was doing my best to enjoy life.
That original article has been moved behind a member's only paywall, but I've shared it below:
My 3-Cents: Gary England should be scared!
Is it just me, or does the FOX 25 weather crew look more like a bunch of Bob Howard car salesmen rather than a group of Oklahoma City weathermen? Instead of talking about the jet stream, hook echoes and the dry line, I picture them sitting around some $0.80-cent draws at Henry Hudson’s blabbering about the hot chick who bought the beat up Accord, what they plan to do with their “future”, and of course, the “good old days.”
Anyway, that there headline, picture and paragraph is the first ever post here at TheLostOgle.com. At this website, a group of young, amazing and strikingly attractive Oklahoma City residents are going to offer our “2-cents”, “rants” or “morning news show styled opinions” on a variety of topics concerning Oklahoma City and the rest of the world. It’s a daunting task. In fact, it’s a task so daunting that only an Ogle brother could do it.
That’s why we’re TheLostOgle.com. And that’s our two cents.
If you would have told me back then that 13 years later I'd find myself sitting in that same back bedroom listening to essentially the same music and writing basically the same stuff for that very same website (and that website would develop into a well-known local brand, go-to "news" source, and incredibly burdensome job), I probably would have asked you to leave the bedroom and cried. I then would have probably deleted the article and went to bed. But you didn't do that, so here we are – 8,719 blog posts and 63-million pageviews later – wondering where the fuck the last 13-years have gone.
Just like anything in life that survives for 13 years, we've had our ups and downs, highs and lows, and good times and bad times. We've survived lawsuits, trolls, in-fighting and out-fighting. We've made people laugh, we've made people cry, and we've made people aware – for better or for worse – that not every person in Oklahoma is a country music singer, redneck or churchy, sanctimonious, humorless tool.