THE TEXAS SCRIBBLER

Haven’t a thing against Austinite actress Sandra Bullock’s winning an Oscar  for playing a rich, religious, patriotic Southern white lady who befriends and helps a poor, homeless black kid become an NFL lineman.
How much more worth seeing the movie would be, however, if her character was a rich, religious, patriotic Southern (yes!) black lady who [...]

It’s a putdown of the InterTubes from 1995 and it’s from Newsweak. Who else?

Vote For Mr. Rhythm
Music by Ralph Rainger, Words by Leo Robin, Al Siegel
Vote for Mr. Rhythm –
Raise up your voice,
And vote for Mr. Rhythm,
The people’s choice.
You’ll be happy with him –
Take my advice,
And vote for Mr. Rhythm;
I’m voting twice!
Ev’ryone’s a friend of his;
His campaign slogan is,
“Change Your Woe
Into a Wo-De-Ho!”
Vote for Mr. Rhythm –
Let [...]

So we stood on the quay with Sam and Merry and Pippen and watched Frodo and Bilbo sail away with Gandalf, Elrond and Galadriel, at the end of The Return of the King. For my son’s second time and my thirteenth or fourteenth.
And when I reached the last sentence and the trilogy we’d [...]

“Do what thy manhood bids thee do, from none but self expect applause;
“He noblest lives and noblest dies who makes and keeps his self-made laws.”
—The Kasidah of Haji Abdu El-Yezdi, by Sir Richard Francis Burton
Via Philip Jose Farmer.

Birth control pills? The automobile? Antibiotics? Arguably. But in this case it’s radar, and Robert Buderi does a grand job of explaining why in the 500-plus pages of his sometimes technical, occasionally confusing, but always compelling 1996 classic, which I recently reread for the third time.
Perhaps it’s most compelling if you use your microwave (whose [...]

Former newspaper colleague turned author Mike Cox has this good column at TexasEscapes about how, because email is killing the post office, it’s time to remember some of the fabled ones.
Because they will, in all probability,  soon be vanishing. Strangely, Mike leaves out the story of how Dime Box got its name. Aided, in part, [...]

One of the more amusing tales  of science fiction is the one where the exploring earthlings, who believe that technological survival requires logic and logical beings can’t be warlike, run smack into an alien warship whose star troopers proceed to eviscerate them. (See Larry Niven’s warcats.)
Comes now a similar argument from New Scientist (”Hello ET, [...]

Let’s face it folks. It can’t all be cub scouts and world-famous barn owls around here. Elsewise my diminished hit count from the recent switch from MT to WP will stay diminished. So, borrowing a hint (and the pix) from CG Hill in Oklahoma (not to mention TFG in San Antonio), here’s Rule 5 at [...]

With Microsoft, that terrible monopoly according to the Starbucks crowd, there’s always a solution. With Apple, there’s always a roadblock.
Trying to move Mrs Charms’ iTunes files from the old computer to the new one requires a free utility called iTunes Export. So far so good. Which leads me to its compressed download which leads me [...]