Have to go with Op-For on this one. The colors are, to say the least, unpleasant to look at. But each one, they say, has a specific meaning for the Texas Air National Guard’s 111th Fighter Squadron, which was established ninety years ago. This was President Bush’s old unit, by the way.
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Posted in Texana
Tagged 90th Anniversary, TANG, Texas Air National Guard 111th Fighter Squadron
It began today, in 1884, in a seven-room house on sixteen acres at 1600 West Sixth Street in Austin. Five years later its backers were soliciting money from Union veterans to run it for the remaining 34 of the 113 veterans that had since occupied the house and an adjoining tent. The state took it over in 1891 and expanded it to twenty-six acres to include a hospital and cottages. Along the way it also housed impoverished veterans of the Spanish-American War and World War I. The last Confederate there died in 1954, age 108. The home was effectively closed in 1963.
Silicon Valley Redneck thinks Austin’s mysterious electric energy breakthrough company, EEStor, doesn’t smell like roses. "Snake-oil," he calls it, marshalling some numbers based on the firm’s very few pronouncements, to show why. The recent, unexplained departure of Mort Topfer, the former Dell vice-chairman from EEStor’s board, suggests SVR could be onto something. That their Web domain is for rent/sale is also not encouraging.
MORE: Things looked a little rosier back in January when Technology Review did this piece.
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Posted in Science/Engineering, Scribbles, Texana
Tagged EEStor, Mort Topfer, Silicon Valley Redneck
Grandma came down from Fort Worth for Thanksgiving and Mr. B. insisted we all watch “Duck Soup” for the umpteenth time. He likes all the gags, especially the peanut-lemonade vendors routine and the mirror number.
Doing a little Web research I was surprised to see that the brothers (top to bottom: Chico [Leonard], Harpo [Adolph], Groucho [Julius Henry] and Zeppo [Herbert]) got their start as a comedy act in 1912 while singing at the Opera House in Nacogdoches (“Nacogdoches is full of roaches,” and “The jackass is the flower of Tex-ass”). Another Texas first. Glad they laughed.
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Posted in Texana
Tagged Duck Soup, Nacogdoches, The Marx Brothers
Or a hungry one. He stuck his head inside the car when Mr. B. and his Mom and Grandma toured Fossil Rim, southwest of Fort Worth, on Sunday. It was such a surprise, they didn’t get a photograph of it.
The remains of South Carolina native and P-3 Orion co-pilot Frank Hand, lost with eleven other crew members when their plane was downed off the coast of Viet Nam in 1968, finally have been repatriated and will be interred today in the Dallas-Fort Worth National Cemetery. Four F/A-18 Hornets will fly over the service for the Eagle Scout who grew up in Fort Worth.
Via Patterico
Cattle brands are registered, and the muleshoe one (an inverted U) is semi-famous. On this day in 1860, cattleman and soon-to-be Confederate veteran Henry Black registered the brand, though others elsewhere in the west would also register variations of it. By the time of his death in 1906, Black’s Muleshoe Ranch covered 10,000 acres of Stephens County, in north Texas west of Fort Worth, and he owned another 30,000 acres.
THE TEXAS SCRIBBLER 