Category Archives: Texana

Rule 5: Tango dancer

Posted on May 7, 2013 | Comments Off on Rule 5: Tango dancer

My versatile fiddle teacher, James Anderson, has a new CD out by his Austin tango band, on which he was a composer and arranger as well as a performer. I’m sure he’d love to have this gal’s talents, even if I can’t find out her name.

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Posted in Music, Rule 5, South of the Border, Texana

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President Pinocchio is coming to town

Posted on May 5, 2013 | Comments Off on President Pinocchio is coming to town

Not Santa Claus, much as he’d like to be. It’s long-winded Barry coming next week to our little burg on the Texas Colorado, at least according to his handlers. We’re one of the four major cities (and most of the Rio Grande Valley) that voted for him in 2012. Although he was still trounced handily in Texas.

He’s presumably here to give one of his soporific  speeches promising this and that. Probably how the Democrats will take over Texas in the future. The far, far future. Yawn. Or else, wonder of wonders, he’ll forget where he is and start pushing for gun control. Oops.

None of which he (or we) will remember within twenty-four hours of his departure. We’ll certainly remember the mess he made of traffic, though. P.’s always do wherever they go. And having nothing else to do, this one is always on the go.

One thing we can be sure President P. won’t talk about is the growing evidence that his appointees (I wonder at whose direction, huh) scurried really fast to cover up the real culprits in the Benghazi murders of 9/11/12 and blame them on some innocuous video no one ever saw.

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Posted in Obamalot, Texana

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Rule 5: Amanda Thatcher

Posted on May 3, 2013 | Comments Off on Rule 5: Amanda Thatcher

The late British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher’s granddaughter, Amanda, is from Highland Park in Dallas. So at least Texas sent a delegation (Amanda and her brother Michael, a graduate of Texas A&M) to the funeral. While our no-class president didn’t bother. Just as well. I’d rather look at Amanda. Wouldn’t you?

Via Phase Line Birnam Wood.

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Posted in Blogosphere, Obamalot, Texana

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LBJ on a donkey

Posted on May 2, 2013 | Comments Off on LBJ on a donkey

When I came back to Texas in 1978, I wasn’t surprised to find that most of the inhabitants were natives. Born here. Never lived anywhere else. Didn’t want to, either.

Things had changed a lot since my very youthful sojourn in Dallas and they have continued to, but, really, not fundamentally. Unless you look through Erica Grieder’s historical lens:

“Think about Texas’s historical baseline compared to that of the United States; project a mental image of the Jazz Age in New York and then contemplate the fact that around that time LBJ was riding to school on a donkey. And things are improving in Texas, more or less across the board.”

The population certainly has ballooned since LBJ’s donkey days in the Hill Country town of Johnson City (named for his ranching grandfather) and, for that matter, since 1978. The traffic in most Texas cities (including onetime [1978] buccolic Austin) is horrendous. And what used to be the pretty rural stretch of highway between Austin and Waco is now pretty much wall-to-wall commerce, including some unsightly junkyards.

Howsomever, Texas still is a nice place to live, work and play. And, as Greider, who formerly covered Gov. Rick Perry for The Economist and now writes for Texas Monthly, shows in her new book the Texas haters could learn a thing or two from us. Not that we can expect them to, of course. Some things are just too much to hope for. But no big whoop. It’s their loss.

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Posted in Blogosphere, Texana, The Economy

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Spiritual wickedness in high places

Posted on April 28, 2013 | Comments Off on Spiritual wickedness in high places

Who’d a thunk it? The Iron Lady’s granddaughter, Amanda Thatcher, is a native Texan. And she gave a ringing salute to her grandmother at her London funeral.

In the militant words of  the KJV’s Ephesians 6 Aamanda urged her listeners to “put on the whole armor of god“ to battle “the rulers of the darkness” and the “spiritual wickedness in high places.” How timely.

The 19-year-old Amanda apparently attends the University of Richmond, just as my sister who lives in Virginia did years ago. Pity, though. Amanda would be much more at home at Texas A&M.

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Posted in Blogosphere, Texana, The War

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Of private security and concealed carry

Posted on April 22, 2013 | Comments Off on Of private security and concealed carry

I don’t expect the Jihadis to show up in Texas anytime soon. I’m sure they prefer the liberal environments of New York, Massachusetts and California with wall-to-wall, unarmed sheep who will ease their planning, arming and execution of mass killings for the glory of their blood-thirsty deity.

Down here, even in liberal Austin, they’re much more likely to encounter an informed and attentive gunner. For instance, the parents of one of Mr. B.’s best friends. They both carry concealed semi-automatic pistols. He’s a diamond merchant who often has the gems on his person and she, well, I’ve never asked but I presume she just feels more secure going about with a pocket pistol similar to this Ruger LCP which is fully reviewed here.

They’re one of the few couples we know who don’t have a private security system sign in the front flower bed of their home. Obviously they don’t need one. Most of us have them, even if we also have loaded firearms in the house. We count on the fact that the average criminal is a lazy bumbler without the imagination to figure out whether the sign announces a real security system or is a sign-only one.

As Wretchard says private security will be even more of a growth industry now after the Boston massacre. If for no other reason, there are lots of refugee Chechens living in the U.S. now and who knows how many pray five times a day? Unless you see their wives covered from head to toe in black ninja suits, you wouldn’t.

Just in case, I do think I will try to find one of the signs that CNN’s resident anti-gunner Piers Morgan has on his lawn. The words “armed response security systems” are so much more threatening than what we have now.

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Posted in Blogosphere, Guns, Mr. Boy, Texana, The War

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In phony looting news…

Posted on April 19, 2013 | Comments Off on In phony looting news…

The cBS headline: “Small Amount of Looting at Texas Blast Site,” follows a script ably dissected by social comentator Rebecca Solnit on how authorities promote division among residents of a disaster area to enhance their power at the expense of community feeling and cooperation. DRUDGE cooperates by enhancing the tale with the headline: “Looters Raid Homes.”

The original cBS story depends on the nebulous quote of one police sergeant who can’t get specific because he apparently has nothing to be specific about. Ah, but the coppers have things well in hand. “Very secure” now they say, keeping even homeowners away from their damaged homes.

Which, of course, also is going on in Watertown, Mass, where postal worker Michael Demirdjian has been barred from his home, which contradicts the WaPo’s headline that residents have been told to stay home behind locked doors. This supposedly to aid the search for one bombing suspect, though I suspect “the authorities” there are simply reveling in their ability to order people around—shutting down schools, businesses and whole neighborhoods.

Looks pretty hysterical from afar. And counterproductive since, as Solnit makes plain with historical evidence, it turns people who might have helped in the search into passive sheep either isolated from one another or herded from one place to the next by armed and strutting bureaucrats who are absolute strangers to the area and in the best of circumstances couldn’t find their posteriors with both hands.

UPDATE:  Forget TSA’s airport excesses, the bureaucrats have turned Boston into a “Prison City.”

MORE:  Life in the Police State “…as convoys of heavily armed officers and troops arrived by the hour.” You couldn’t pay me to live in Massachusetts.

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Posted in Blogosphere, Library, Texana

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