Tom Spinker photo of a Texas rattler, via Accuweather, which picked up Earth & Sky’s warning of a suburban invasion of “very hungry” snakes this month due to the drought.
We’ll be watching.
Fortunately, rattlers generally aren’t killers, unlike, say, Texas coral snakes, which are relatives of the King Cobra. But the rattler’s bite is painful and everybody reacts differently.
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Posted in Blogosphere, Scribbles, Texana, Weather/Climate
Tagged Accuweather, Earth & Sky, photographer Tom Spinker, Texas rattlesnakes
Except, of course, of Jerusalem.
Very funny video about how Obamalot has united New York Republicans, Democrats and Independents seeking the Jewish vote by condemning his Israel policy.
Getting antsy at the rancho with drought-induced wildfires to the north, east, south and west. Hundreds of homes destroyed in all those directions, plus about 16,000 acres of pine forest out in Bastrop County. Nothing in our immediate area yet but we’ve got the garden hoses ready just in case.
Firefighters don’t know what’s causing the fires. Arson doesn’t seem to be the culprit. But they know what’s spreading them: High winds caused by a cold front moving slowly towards us from the northwest.
Usually one of those attracts wind and moisture out of the Gulf and the differential in temperatures causes rain showers, if not thunderstorms. But all the moisture seems to be tied up in Tropical Storm Lee, leaving us with the winds—and, thanks to the drought, wildfires.
UPDATE: Good roundup story by the daily, which is leading Drudge.
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Posted in Rancho Roly Poly, Scribbles, Texana, Weather/Climate
This is one strange piece of music, first composed in 1936. Compelling, however, and also strange to think that a Swing-era big-band leader chose this for his theme song. Downloadable for free at this link, or just play it there until you tire of it. If you do. I didn’t so I bought it at Amazon for 99 cents.
Clarinetist Artie Shaw was the band leader, a nice Jewish boy who had a few other quirks. Which I am discovering in this exceptional biography. Married eight times. Estranged from two kids—though one of them made an effort to forgive Artie in his old age. Not a model in the parenting or husband department, obviously, but a helluva musician who lived to age 94, and was gutsy to boot.
Shaw, already famous and wealthy, did WW2 as a Navy chief leading a Swing band for the forces at front-line places like Guadalcanal where he was once bracketed by dropped Japanese bombs and went deaf in one ear. The word picture I can’t forget is from 1943: his band playing Nightmare as they descended on an aircraft elevator to their below decks audience on the aircraft carrier Saratoga.
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Posted in Library, Music, Scribbles
Tagged "Nightmare", artie shaw, USS Saratoga
Think American school shootings, stabbings, and general violence leading to death are a modern phenom? Think again.
Not counting Indian “warrior” raids on schools, first recorded in 1764, the first recorded one was in 1871, in La Grange County, Indiana. There were just six more in the Nineteenth Century.
Then things really picked up. The Bloody Twentieth Century recorded twenty-three before World War II. Fourteen more by 1960. Then a hundred and thirty-two before the Columbine High School massacre in Littleton, CO, in April, 1999.
Followed by a hundred and twenty-six more by Jan. 22 of this year. Whew.
So these things really aren’t new, except in the sense of clothing fashions, i.e. what’s old is new again.
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Posted in Blogosphere, Obituaries, Scribbles, Texana
Tagged Charles Whitman, Columbine, school shootings
One use of federal tax money I support is the establishment and maintenance of historical parks. Such as the closing of Fortress Monroe (the green area inside the blue moat above at the mouth of the Chesapeake Bay) which the Army has decided to abandon.
Not because I used to spend time there in 1970-71 when I was an Army recruiter and recruiting headquarters was then at Monroe. Nope.
But because, well, among its other historical aspects, the fort that was built when USA was a new republic has the cell where Confederate President Jefferson Davis was imprisoned after the Civil War.
It was also horror writer and poet Edgar Allen Poe’s home when he was an Army artillery sergeant in the early 1800s. There’s just too much history there to let some developer turn it into beachfront condos.
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Posted in Civil War, Scribbles, Troops
Tagged closing fortress monroe, make fort monroe a national historical park
For generations, Americans basically had one painting/lithograph of Lee’s surrender at Appomattox in 1865. It showed Lee sitting amicably at the same table with Grant. It was Northern propaganda intended to help reunite the country.
Finally, back in the mid-1980s, the print was replaced with this one from participant descriptions of the actual scene and it began to be sold in National Park Service bookstores. It helps explain why North-South animosity endured for more than a hundred years after the war.
THE TEXAS SCRIBBLER 