One of the prettier wildflowers of Texas, becoming rather commonly planted in flowerbeds these days. Birds, or maybe cowboys (some say it’s called the Cowboy Rose), have scattered its seeds, so that it can be found throughout North Dakota and Utah down to Texas.
Neel, a 1998 graduate of Fredericksburg, Tx, high school, and, in 2005, of the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, died in Iraq April 9, of wounds from a grenade assualt while leading his 8th Cavalry Regt. platoon:
“Phillip was an inspiration and leader to his five siblings,” his family said in a prepared statement… “He led by example and consistently challenged them to do the right thing in all circumstances, no matter what pressures were involved.”
A memorial service for him is planned Saturday in Fredericksburg.
UPDATE The San Antonio Express News report on the memorial: "Phillip Neel often sat and prayed at the West Point cemetery overlooking the Hudson River in New York, and it was there he watched smoke rise from the World Trade Center in 2001, his dad said."
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Posted in Iraq, The War, Troops
Tagged 1LT Phillip Isaac Neel, Fredericksburg, Iraq, Texas
West of Austin is Johnson City, the town LBJ’s ancestors settled, and where he grew up. West of Johnson City is this mammoth chrome longhorn cow standing sentinal over the highway to Stonewall and points west. This is someone’s idea of art. It certainly is an arresting sight.
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Tagged Johnson City, Longhorn Cow, RoboCow, Texas
Mr. Boy got the game ball after his Muckdogs beat the Mudcats 15 to 12. He was pleased, of course. The coach said it was for his good hitting, all three big ones. The Muckdogs are now 3-1 for the Little League season.
March ended with almost three times the amount of rain Austin normally gets. Indeed, with almost 14 inches recorded at Austin-Bergstrom International Airport since Jan. 1, we’ve already received almost half the rain we normally get in a year. But KVUE’s chief meteorologist Mark Murray expects it all to end as the La Nina weathermaker strengthens, making April a transition month back to dry. So it looks at the weather service’s Climate Prediction Center here from now through June.
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Posted in Weather/Climate
Tagged La Nina, National Weather Service, Texas
Still a little dizzy from 6.5 hours on the road to get home from Fort Davis, but it was worth it. Time flies at 90 mph, which you can do on I-10 from about 20 miles east of Junction all the way to Balmorhea. The speed limit is 80 mph but, of course, no one drives the speed limit in Texas or anywhere else. Burns a lot of gas, though. It’s mostly flat land so not many curves to force you to slow down. We were surprised at the big windmills lining the ridges on the north side of the highway from about Ozona to Fort Stockton. Big three-bladed electricity generators, turning briskly last Monday in a stiff breeze, which continued, Lubbock-like, most of the time we were in the Davis Mountains, but finally settled down Wednesday night. So coming back the big windmills were turning more leisurely. More on the trip later.
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Posted in Rancho Roly Poly, Texana
Tagged Davis Mountains, Fort Davis, Fort Stockton, Ozona, Texas
Wooden-soled shoes? Probably never heard of them. They were Robert Creuzbaur’s invention, before he turned to a design for an underwater torpedo tube. The early Texas surveyor and draftsman, won a patent in 1863 for both his shoes and his torpedo tube, which he called an underwater cannon. It would be the chief armament of his Sea King, an iron-plated wooden gunboat whose underwater gun might sink the wooden warships blockading the Texas Gulf coast and the coastline of the rest of the Confederate States of America.
The Confederate Navy wasn’t impressed with his boat or his weapon. Their report to the Confederate Congress in 1862, "…by a number of eminent naval officers…stated ‘that nothing has been done to prove the alleged claims to the speed, invulnerability, and efficiency of the vessel in either or all of which we have no confidence.’"
So much for the early submarine. The same year, 145 years ago Thursday, saw the ironclads Monitor and Merrimac (also the Virginia) fight to a draw in Hampton Roads. By the time Creuzbaur got his shoe and torpedo tube patents, North and South were betting on iron ships, but not underwater cannons for sinking wooden ones. After the war, Cruezbaur moved to New York where, besides investing in the inventions of others, he faded into an obscurity not even Google can penetrate.
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Tagged early torpedo tube, Robert Creuzbaur, Sea King, Texas
THE TEXAS SCRIBBLER 
