Well, between two dollars and eighteen cents and two dollars and eighty-nine cents a gallon of regular in Austin. I don’t see how this can do anything except turn the economy around, lowering food prices (food being delivered by truck) and stimulating travel and tourism.
MORE: It could be this is mainly the reaction of the thugocracy oil ticks to the threat of competition ("Drill, baby, drill.") Why else would Russia withdraw from Georgia, and might never invade Ukraine?
In case you ever wondered which came first, Abilene, Kansas, or Abilene, Texas, it was the former not the latter. Indeed, the Texas version began this very day in a little 1883 dispute over land east of Catclaw Creek.
Best analysis I’ve seen so far, and there are more than a few out there. Be sure to vote, especially if you’re voting for Mac and Sarah. The drumbeat "news" about Barry’s juggernaut lead is highly suspect, as per usual in the Dems-media symbiosis. Including longtime Dem pollster Zogby International, to mention just one. Followed by this utterly contradtictory AP poll.
Could be the "news" audience is finally catching on. How else to explain this?
Closer to home, the rancho is in a precinct that, in recent years, has been solidly Democrat–unsurprising in Austin’s blue anomaly in a very red state. Yet I have noticed this month quite a number of McCain-Palin lawn signs–a few of them already detached (accidentally?) from their supports. Something is up, and the national polls and the local "news" are not reflecting it.
Via Instapundit.
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Posted in Blogosphere, Rancho Roly Poly, Scribbles, Texana, Uncategorized
Fellow Texan Beldar’s take on the last formal debate before the looong election is over:
"John McCain did fine at the third debate, but he benefited mostly because Barack Obama’s ordinariness became more obvious to more people. More people escaped the mass hypnosis tonight. They sat up suddenly, took a deep breath, and as they watched Barack Obama, do you know what they did next?"
(Check the headline) Heh.
So a large majority of the three-hundred-sixty members of the Aledo High senior class voted for Kristin Pass, an eighteen-year-old with Down Syndrome for homecoming queen. Neat story worth a tear or two about Kristin and her classmates in the little North Texas town west of Fort Worth.
I’m not surprised, though. The Down’s kids I’ve met were uniformly friendly and sweet. Some people think their retardation should be grounds for abortion–and they have sneered at Sarah Palin for not aborting her Down’s son–but the real tragedy of these kids’ lives is that they often die young.
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Posted in Texana
Tagged Aledo, Down Syndrome, Kristin Pass, Texas
You mought find it curious, I’ll warrant, that the dialect Yankees have always associated with hillbillies, crackers and rednecks, in fact originated in their own neck of the woods. And so Conrad Richter delivers it in The Trees, the first (1941) book in his Awakening Land triology.
It’s the memorable story of Worth and Jary Luckett, and their spirited children, especially daughter Sayward, woodsies all, who pull up stakes and leave behind their puncheon-floor cabin in 1780s Pennsylvania, treking single-file into the virgin forests of the Ohio Valley to start anew.
Their "early, vigorous spoken language," Richter notes in his foreward, "contrary to public belief, had its considerable origin in the Northeastern states, whence it was carried by emigrants into pioneer Ohio and adjoining territories, where today it has largely disappeared, and along with the Pennsylvania rifle, into the South and Southwest, where it has more widely survived…"
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Posted in Genealogy, Library, Texana
Tagged Awakening Land triology, Conrad Richter, early American dialect, The Trees
They loved the sunsets in Gilchrist, the working-class people in the seashore homes, but the people are just about all gone now. Hurricane Ike wiped most of the little village away. Its collection of mainly homes on stilts, just above the flat ground of the narrowest point on Bolivar Peninsula, was just east of devastated Galveston.
The peninsula in general, and Gilchrist in particular, took the fierce right side of the Category 2 hurricane: the 110-mph winds and a storm surge estimated at 15 feet or more (topped by 20-foot high battering waves). Combined, they swept much of Gilchrist clean, as shown in the Accuweather shot above, and in these before and after photos. No one knows how many residents elected to stay to ride out the storm. Apparently few survived. There isn’t even enough debris to search. Gilchrist was one place whose peril was not overestimated.
Via Jeff Masters.
UPDATE: The owners of the lone, surviving house above finally return to it. Turns out the photo is not by Accuweather, but by Smiley N. Pool, now at the Houston Chronicle, formerly of the Austin daily.
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Posted in Texana, Weather/Climate
Tagged Bolivar Peninsula, Gilchrist, Hurricane Ike
THE TEXAS SCRIBBLER 