THE TEXAS SCRIBBLER

I’ve had Tinnitus, a ringing in the ears, since I came home from the Vietnam War in 1970. Although it can have several medical origins, I’ve always attributed it to months of being in close proximity to the staccato noise of machine guns and automatic rifles. Last night I was awaked by what sounded like [...]

Was tuning up my violin this morning, partly because I enjoy playing in the morning and partly because it helps get Mr. B. out of bed and on the way to school. Then I launched into the strains of the new Scottish ballad I’m learning How’d you like waking up to “My Love Is Like [...]

This Scottish lament, a pretty song which I recently learned to play on the violin, has a curious history to go along with its curious title. It was composed in 1903 by Scottish fiddler J. Scott Skinner to honor a friend—a Scottish general in the British army who was publically accused of homosexuality with boys. [...]

I’ve finished several new ones lately, some I’ve reviewed at Amazon and others I haven’t, either for lack of time or indecision about how to put my conclusions about them. Even when I enjoyed them as much as I did these. Ashes of Candesce seems to be the end of an incredibly imaginative five-part series. [...]

Nope, we never tire of Betty around here at the rancho. Well, not me.

It looks fat enough in the photographs to be a viola, but it’s doubtful the folks at Strings would have missed that detail—even though its “discovery” has been announced several times in the past two decades. Nevertheless, it does now seem to be the actual fiddle that went down with the Titanic. Well, not down [...]

SpaceX’s new rocket motor (for propulsive landings, just like the ones in the scifi stories) has “shock diamonds” in its plume. The phenom was first seen in the 1950s in the exhaust plume of the Bell X-1, the first craft to fly faster than the speed of sound. The “diamonds” are more visible in this [...]

First freeze of the year for us out there at the moment, which will probably blacken the nice green elephant ears in the rancho’s front flower bed. But this is mild (only 30 degrees) compared to the one that walloped Tulia, Texas this morning back in 1899. Forty thousand cattle dying overnight? Yipes.

So I finally took the Honda in to let the dealer check on a recall alert I got in the mail last week saying the trigger on the driver’s airbag was so faulty that it might cause injury or even death. Mine. Nothing like the prospect of hanging to concentrate the mind. Harmless, the dealer [...]

The thunderstorms overnight Tuesday into Wednesday were welcome in most places, except where they provoked trouble: power out for a few thousand homes, hail damage, street and creek flooding, emergency rescues, and at least one tornado. The National Weather Service, whose Internet radar images always seem to go down on these occasions when they’re needed, [...]