Category Archives: Texana

The sparrow and the duckweed

Posted on December 28, 2010 | Comments Off on The sparrow and the duckweed

Watching the flying pigs strip the feeder this morning, I was reminded of the duckweed in Lake Austin. Both were introduced, the seed-eating bird to the country and the duck-food weed to the lake and both quickly spread and multiplied.

Mrs. Charm looked it up. The house sparrow was introduced to Brooklyn, it says here, in 1851, to control caterpillars. The weed, I already knew, was sown in the 1940s to attract ducks to Austin’s fake lake created by dams on the Texas Colorado River to create a picturesque scene for the populace. Bird and weed ran wild.

The sparrows now are found everywhere people are, and their seed feeders, of course. They are the most abundant bird in the world. And there are still plenty of caterpillars. The weed was even less successful. It attracted few ducks but became a magnet for outboard motors, clogging them and the lake itself. So much so that the lake is artificially lowered annually to cut back the weed. Heh.

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Posted in Mrs. Charm, Rancho Roly Poly, Texana

Wassail and etc.

Posted on December 25, 2010 | Comments Off on Wassail and etc.

We here at the rancho in the valley offer our kindest felicitations for your having arrived at yet another of these seasons, and the fervent hope that your punch bowl be filled with spicy liquid merriment and that all of your problems be little ones. Nay, infinitesimals.

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Posted in Mr. Boy, Mrs. Charm, Rancho Roly Poly, Texana

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Those Californicators

Posted on December 21, 2010 | Comments Off on Those Californicators

Victor Davis Hanson’s take on why I am seeing so many California license plates in the H.E.B. parking lot these days. Because they’re leaving the West Coast, at the rate of at least 2,000 to 3,000 a week:

“…a state that has the highest sales and income taxes, the most lavish entitlements, the near-worst public schools (based on federal test scores), and the largest number of illegal aliens in the nation, along with an over-regulated private sector, a stagnant and shrinking manufacturing base, and an elite environmental ethos that restricts commerce and productivity without curbing consumption.”

This time we better all pray these California trends are NOT the wave of the future.

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Posted in South of the Border, Texana

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Drought returns

Posted on December 17, 2010 | Comments Off on Drought returns

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Moderate to severe drought has the Austin area in its grip once again, with just three quarters of an inch of rain since Oct. 1. Relax, it’s not AGW. Drought is our normal condition.

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Posted in Texana, Weather/Climate

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Doctor Jazz vs Cactus Jack

Posted on December 13, 2010 | Comments Off on Doctor Jazz vs Cactus Jack

220px-Jelly_Roll_Blues_1915The Jelly Roll Blues arguably was the first published jazz composition. Ferdinand Joseph LaMothe (better known as Jelly Roll Morton) claimed to have written it in 1905 after inventing the musical form three years earlier.

I especially like Morton’s 1920s version of Louis Armstrong idol Joe “King” Oliver’s Doctor Jazz. The first time I heard it, though, I thought Morton was saying “Cactus Jack,” referring to legendary Texas pol John Nance Garner. Not likely.

Civil War note: Morton got his start playing piano in a brothel in New Orleans, then wandered the country, made records, etc. Wound up in D.C. in the historic  Shaw neighborhood which grew out of freed slave camps and was named for Union Colonel Robert Gould Shaw. He commanded the 54th Massachusetts, one of the first Union black regiments, which was celebrated in the movie Glory. Jelly Roll Morton, whose music still is available, died in 1941.

You could hardly do better than to own a copy of Doctor Jazz. Even though it has nothing to do with Cactus Jack.

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Posted in Library, Scribbles, Texana

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Honor Our Fallen

Posted on December 3, 2010 | Comments Off on Honor Our Fallen

Start with the latest:

Army Pvt. Devon J. Harris

Died November 27, 2010 serving during Operation Enduring Freedom

Age 24, of Mesquite, Tex.; assigned to Brigade Special Troops Battalion, 10th Mountain Division, at Ft. Polk, La.; died Nov. 27 in Wardak province, Afghanistan, of wounds suffered when insurgents attacked his unit with a rocket-propelled grenade.

Read it all.

When W was president, the legacy media was clamoring to photograph the latest dead hero’s arrival home. Now that a Democrat is, there’s a blackout on that aspect of the war. Strange how that works, eh?

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Posted in Afghanistan, Iraq, Texana, The War, Troops

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Try as they may, A&M can’t change the Ags

Posted on December 2, 2010 | Comments Off on Try as they may, A&M can’t change the Ags

One of my old girlfriends is an Aggie, one of the first, in fact, to co-educate the place, and I’ve always admired her pluck.

D.G. Myers’s farewell to all that, in leaving teaching at Texas A&M, files includes this regret:

“But what I will miss, far more than anything else, are the Aggies. They endure many jokes at their expense as if they were the Polacks of the academic world. Even Larry McMurtry, in ‘Moving On,’ could not resist a crack about an Aggie and his tractor.

Aggies are badly misunderstood, however. It is true they are not sophisticated, and it is true they are overwhelmingly Evangelical Christian and politically conservative, although the administration has done everything in its power to alter the makeup of the student body and bring A&M into conformity with every other unexceptionally Leftist university in the country. Aggies remain unique, proudly different.”

Don’t miss his funny story of the Ag-with-toothpick who discovers—to his horror—that he actually understands sophisticated literary ideas.

(I neglected to post about it at the time, but I was delighted when the Ags beat the Longhorns this year. The Horns stunk up the state this season and they deserved to be put in their place for it. And nobody is better at that than A&M.)

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Posted in Blogosphere, Library, Texana, Texas Football

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