Category Archives: Scribbles

The girl from Mexia

Posted on February 12, 2007 | Comments Off on The girl from Mexia

I wasn’t going to write about the late Anna Nicole Smith, or Vickie, as some of her friends called her. But she was a Texas girl, and so maybe it’s fitting. She liked to be compared to Marilyn Monroe, but, as others have pointed out, Marilyn was smarter and more talented, and she also had an affair with a former president. No, not Clinton. Another Democrat. JudyAnn, of Just Muttering, concluded from watching the talking heads discuss ANS that she "entrusted her business as well as herself to people with the trustworthiness of tumbleweeds." Even one of her former high school teachers doesn’t like to analyze her, except to indicate (via his brother) that people in Mexia (muh-HAY-ah), a little country town northeast of Waco, are kind of ashamed of her. Oh, I don’t know. She wasn’t any trashier than the rest of the mindless celebs of American pop culture. Maybe she was even a little bit classier, if only because, being from a small place like Mexia, where she had worked at a local carryout joint, she probably knew all along what people really thought of her. Hopefully the daughter she left behind, over whom several claiming-to-be fathers are squabbling in hopes of getting some of the money ANS fought so long for from her deceased 89-year-old Houston husband, will be able to grow up with some semblance of a normal life. Hopefully.

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Posted in Scribbles

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Sense, instead of nonsense

Posted on February 11, 2007 | Comments Off on Sense, instead of nonsense

Where are the journalists protecting us from government overreach? What? Leading the bandwagon?

"’The good news is, that it should not take long for the latest environmental scare to join the ‘ozone layer’, ‘global winter’, the Club of Rome forecasts, and many other crocks on the shard-heap of history. The bad is, it will be succeeded by more Chicken-Little expostulations, with the same propagandist theme: ‘Unless the planet is delivered immediately into the iron embrace of the environmental bureaucracies, we’re all going to die!’”

Double heh. 

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Posted in Science/Engineering, Scribbles

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Shameless political promotion

Posted on February 9, 2007 | Comments Off on Shameless political promotion

Akaky, he of (as he puts it) the Vampire State, has raised another $5.75 for his pursuit of the Democrat presidential nomination, after he crosses the street to redeem the bottles at the grocery. But the MSM is still ignoring him and Daily Kos hasn’t even taken to sneering at his conservative views and demanding that he, like Joe Lieberman, be run out of the party. So he’s taken to slyly including the name of former Playmate Roberta Vasquez in his political posts, a naked (as it were) attempt to raise his hit count. That’s because he had previously noticed that his mentions of her had drawn an inordinate large number of search engine visitors.

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Posted in Blogosphere, Scribbles

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Bessie Coleman

Posted on February 8, 2007 | Comments Off on Bessie Coleman

For Black History Month, Miriam at Miriam’s Ideas comes up with a thoughtful look at the first licensed African-American pilot, Bessie Coleman, a Texas native who barnstormed across the state.

"Every Memorial Day, black men and women aviators fly in formation over the grave of Bessie Coleman, dropping bouquests of flowers on the grave of the first black woman ever to earn a pilot’s license."

The manner of Coleman’s premature death is a reminder of how much things have changed since the open-cockpit, wooden spar and wire-and-cloth days of the 1920s.

UPDATE  Transcript of good 2002 Voice of America feature on Coleman. And this longer, very detailed feature about her flying in Lockheed-Martin’s quarterly magazine Code One.

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Posted in Blogosphere, Scribbles, Texana

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Love on the launch pad

Posted on February 6, 2007 | Comments Off on Love on the launch pad

It ain’t rocket science. It’s plain old adultery and attempted kidnapping and murder. I’m sure everyone and his cousin will have something to say about NASA astronaut and Navy Capt. Lisa Nowak, 43, before she finally fades from view–probably behind prison walls. Wonkette is already calling her a "diaper-clad nutbucket." And there’s this little irony. But really. I guess it just goes to show that not even a Naval Academy degree, pilot wings, an 0-6 rank, having three children and flying in Earth orbit can change the fundamentals. Among them: that the heart, to borrow the title of the Carson Mccullers’ tale, is a lonely hunter.

UPDATE  As NYTimes science writer John Tierney says, wow, people are finally talking about the space shuttle. Unfortunately, it’s about another tragic crash.

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Posted in Scribbles, Space

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Uncle Don

Posted on February 5, 2007 | Comments Off on Uncle Don

Checking in with Mystic Chords now and then to play his latest jazz video, gradually got me to thinking about our family legend, my uncle by marriage, the late big band and jazz drummer Don Lamond. He played with Woody Herman’s big bands in the 1940s, then in the 1950s with be-bop artists like Charlie Parker.

"Lamond developed a reputation as an innovative, bebop-oriented drummer, and he can be heard on several classic bebop recordings, including Charlie Parker’s ‘Relaxin’ at Camarillo,’ Serge Chaloff’s ‘Blue Serge," and guitarist Johnny Smith’s ‘Moonlight in Vermont.’"

Later, he played with the studio band of the Tonight Show when Steve Allen was the host. Here’s a YouTube clip from the Tonight Show of Uncle Don in a drum-off with Louis Bellson and Lionel Hampton.

He was married to my mother’s sister for many years. They divorced in the late 1950s, and even word of him dropped out of my life after that. He remarried and moved to Florida in the 1970s, playing with a band at Disney World when it opened. He was still playing there shortly before he died in 2003, at age 82. I was too young to have known him, but he was a family legend–like some musicians, a vaguely disreputable one, and therefore always intriguing.

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Posted in Obituaries, Scribbles

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Save the planet, 2

Posted on February 3, 2007 | Comments Off on Save the planet, 2

Professor Reynolds’ snarky suggestion to ban private jets and stretch limos to fight global warming certainly appeals to me. Since the celebs and politicos are gathering behind new demands for restrictions to tame the warmth–even if it may be a natural, and benign, process over which humans have no control–by restricting the rest of us, why not have them belly up to the bar, as well? But the Libertarian professor, Instapundit, accused of being merely snarky, makes a good argument of his own as to what needs to be done:

"Energy conservation needs to be something positive. Nothing sells on a "suffer for the future" model very well. Too many environmental activists are hair-shirt types (at least when the hair-shirt is for other people) and that stuff is poor salesmanship…This lesson applies to lots of other things, too. Neo-puritanism, on the other hand, has a certain personal and political appeal to some people, but it doesn’t sell beyond its niche. The less scold, the more sold."

Worth a read.

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Posted in Scribbles, Weather/Climate

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