Category Archives: Texana

Guns on campus defeated

Posted on June 1, 2009 | Comments Off on Guns on campus defeated

Not surprisingly, commonsense has failed the Texas Lege, that notable bastion of insipidity, and the concealed-carry-on-campus bill that passed the Texas Senate never made it out of the House. It has officially failed for the session. Might be brought back. Might not. Wouldbe campus killers take note: You’re still good to go. Nobody will shoot back and, as always, the cops won’t get there in time to stop you.

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Morning haze at Port Aransas

Posted on May 28, 2009 | Comments Off on Morning haze at Port Aransas

Looks like it’s going to be a rainy day on the beach at Port A. Webcams on the Net sure are fun. You have to refresh this one periodically. The Panama Canal one below refreshes itself.

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Concealed carry on campus

Posted on May 21, 2009 | Comments Off on Concealed carry on campus

The Texas Senate has passed the bill, SB 1164. Now it’s up to the House, where passage is far more problematic because of more Democrat influence and a weak Speaker.

The Lege is due to work all weekend, in its usual biennial rush to do everything at the last minute, so we’ll just have to wait and see. Meanwhile, the usual suspects are frothing, but notice that the commenters there aren’t having any of the predictable anti-gun flapdoodle. I’m still in favor of the idea. I just doubt the Lege is capable of this much commonsense.

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Gov. Shivers’ jumbled papers

Posted on May 19, 2009 | Comments Off on Gov. Shivers’ jumbled papers

The past two mornings I’ve spent at the State Archives going through a small portion of the 561 cubic feet of materials from the 1950s administration of Texas Gov. Alan Shivers. I’m looking for some correspondence of importance to a book of Texana I’m putting together. Shivers played a minor but significant role in the story.

Alas, I haven’t found what I’m looking for. And no wonder. The materials are a jumble. The dates on some of the folders, in the four boxes I’ve been through so far, often don’t match the dates on all of their contents. At one point I asked the young archivist helping me if anyone, state or academic, has been through all of this stuff and indexed it in some manner other than just the (alleged) contents of the boxes. The answer was no, no one. It all came to the state in 1977 and has been largely untouched since then. What, I wonder, do Texas academic historians actually research these days?

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Go Rangers!

Posted on May 18, 2009 | Comments Off on Go Rangers!

They are leading their division. But, as we all know, it might not be so by the All-Star break. Probably won’t be. Being a Texas Rangers fan is almost as good a lesson in humility as being a Cubs fan. So we cheer while we can.

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Flying the Texas flag upside down

Posted on May 17, 2009 | Comments Off on Flying the Texas flag upside down

This is a funny site about a situation I didn’t realize was so prevalent: flying the Lone Star upside down. Actually, there’s an easy way to remember that the white part is rightside up, and the red part is downside down. It’s not PC, just a fact: in the struggle to settle Texas, the whites came out on top.

Their culture was entirely incompatible with that of the nomadic Comanches and Apaches, and especially the cannibalistic Tonkawas. Texas historian T.R. Fehrenbach explained it very well: "On the frontier, it was Them or Us and They were killed so that We might live. In such wars the defeated vanish in ignominy. The winners hold out neither hope nor generosity." It wasn’t about good or bad. Only survival.

Via Texas Blog Notes.

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Dildos are a Girl’s Best Friend?

Posted on May 12, 2009 | Comments Off on Dildos are a Girl’s Best Friend?

I know, I know. This is a family blog. More or less. But I couldn’t resist a post on the article by that title to be found on the Houston Chronicle’s new Web site. It’s supposedly a puffer for a Montrose boutique. What it really is (in addition to a first for Texas daily newspaper journalism) is a bid to make some money by pandering to the Web’s porn audience. Uh, like me, too? Why no, course not.

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Posted in Library, Texana

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