Category Archives: Texana

Shrinking government

The so-called “progressives” are always expanding government, especially after the bureaucrats abuse their power or otherwise screw it up. I have watched this phenom for years after every Texas tornado or hurricane.

FEMA was late again getting aid to Oklahoma (big surprise) but you can bet that instead of getting its head handed to it by Congress, FEMA will get more money and more bureaucrats to “solve” the problems. We can be sure the Democrats will try to do the same with the IRS scandal:

“The progressive answer to this is more rules and regulators, more agencies and safeguards and accountability projects. Republicans should recognize this intervention for the ridiculousness it is – creating more federal entities to watch over federal entities – and focus their arguments instead on the only solution which will actually work: removing power from the federal government and returning it to the states or the people. The only way to ensure that government doesn’t abuse a power is to make sure it doesn’t have this power in the first place.”

Read that last line again:The only way to ensure that government doesn’t abuse a power is to make sure it doesn’t have this power in the first place.”

For instance, how about a flat tax or a national sales tax? Eliminate all the discretion now given to the IRS and its partisan Democrat thugs.

Not that I think the Republicans are any more likely to shrink government than the Democrats. Indeed, they’ve proven they won’t. But they’re our last (and fading) hope.

UPDATE:  U.S. ‘crats have held up Canadian charity relief supplies for Oklahoma tornado victims at the border.

Gephyrophobia

Finally, a name for what ails me. Not near as bad as when it started, sometime in the early 80s, but still, occasionally, impressive enough even on the Highway 183 overpasses to force me to keep my eyes on the road ahead of the vehicle and not dare to look to either side.

That’s the only way I used to be able to get over the steep bridge from Aransas Pass to the ferry across the Corpus Christi Ship Channel to Port Aransas. The Chesapeake Bay Bridge, on an early 90s visit with Mrs. Charm, put me into a cold sweat. I was shaking the whole, long, four miles of it.

The short, steep bridge from Portland to Corpus Christi? I saw it coming and pulled over to sit and decide whether I could do it. I decided I couldn’t and made a U-turn when the traffic permitted and took the long way around.

Nice to know it’s not a problem unique to me, though its origin is a mystery.

Via Instapundit

Typical wet Memorial Day weekend

We got three and a half inches in an hour Friday at the rancho (raining so hard when school let out I went to pick up Mr. B) and another half inch overnight. The waterfall in the back forty was in full flow within 30 minutes.

Supposed to rain more this afternoon. None of which is really surprising. May is our wettest month, on average, and Memorial Day weekend has been rainy pretty much every year since at least the 1981 Memorial Day floods.

Which were so awful (11 inches in three hours) that I briefly reunited with my ex-wife, checking on her safety since she lived near one of the flooded creeks and I didn’t want her parents blaming me for her death. She was okay.

UPDATE:  No rain to speak of at the rancho Saturday, but San Antonio got inundated by 10 inches, sweeping a city bus off the road, and leaving two dead.

MORE:  Did get a downpour Sunday morning that almost immediately put the waterfall back in business for about 30 minutes. Probably an inch altogether.

The Bodhran at LOCO

Eleven folks showed up last night for our weekly pickup contra dance band, including a guy with a bodhran, a Celtic drum, which was a first since I started sitting in on backup fiddle in late February. (Last week there was a guy with a recorder but he didn’t return.)

Most of us, as usual, were fiddlers, though a guitar, a banjo and a mandolin were there to help keep the bodhran on tempo. One fiddler, a guy I like to call the banker because of the way he dresses—as if just coming from the executive suite—was really cutting loose as always, stomping both feet like a Breton fiddler, playing the melody on such pieces as The Hanged Man’s Reel.

Racing clouds preceded twister

Was out in the back forty about noon Monday, checking to see if any new deer had jumped the privacy fence to get at the rancho’s roses. Had one Sunday, and an earlier one a week ago. Still trying to figure where they’re getting over.

Saw no deer but was struck by the clouds overhead. Coming out of the northwest and the southeast. They were just racing north. Wind was picking up, of course. Had to be a low out there somewhere, in the direction of Round Rock, probably. Hoped it would spawn a thunderstorm and bring us some rain.

Had no idea then that the low was as far north as Oklahoma or that about 3 p.m. CDT it would spawn a killer tornado that would wipe out two elementary schools south of Oklahoma City. G-d bless the dead and the injured and the devastated untouched, so to speak. Glad to see that CGHill at Dustbury, at the Bandwidth Wastage Station, survived this “last rite of spring” as he blogged it.

Heard some fool Democrat blaming global warming/climate change. The usual dreck. This is Tornado Alley, nitwit, beginning down here around Austin and stretching as far north as South Dakota. We get these bastards every year about this time. Wouldn’t have wished it on Oklahoma, especially not those dead kids and their devastated parents. But I’m sure thankful it didn’t spin up anywhere near us.

Tearing down the melody

“You don’t have to play every note,” mandolin player Earl Hunt told me when I said I was still learning to play hoedowns (reels) and jigs as fast as the melody fiddlers do in our pickup contra dance band.

How do you decide which ones to leave out, I wondered aloud, and he smiled and replied, “Keep practicing.”

It’s really rather simple, my fiddle teacher told me. It’s called “tearing down the melody,” eliminating the notes that are there just for show, “the fiddle fireworks,” he called them. The notes which don’t contribute to the melody. So long as they’re not crucial to the rhythm, which is foremost.

Meanwhile, I’m also struggling to learn to play (scales now, tunes later) with the Georgia and Nashville shuffle bowing patterns. There’s always something new to learn.

Ted Cruz, our favorite civil “bully”

Imagine old sour-puss and nasty Harry Reid calling someone else a schoolyard bully. Ah, well, little men with little minds, etc. Our newest (and some would say our very best) Texas senator got him back nicely:

“As I noted yesterday, the Senate is not a schoolyard. Setting aside the irony of calling someone a bully and then shouting them down when they attempt to respond, today I wish simply to commend my friend from Nevada for his candor.”

Touche, Harry, though it probably went over your head.

Via Hot Air.

Here’s some of what got Harry’s goat:

“What we do know leads to the inescapable impression that before, during, and after the Benghazi attacks, there was confusion and paralysis at the Department of Defense, the Department of State, and the White House.”