Tag Archives: Texas

The second-grade choice

Posted on February 9, 2008 | Comments Off on The second-grade choice

Obama-rama, the Keep Hope Alive candidate who is already leading his enthralled leftie audiences in Jesse Jackson-like chanting, is the presidential pick of most of the kids in Mr. Boy’s second-grade class. Mr. B., whose occasional rebellion in the behavior department masks his generally-conformist nature, says he also is for the O man because "he gives good speeches." But you shouldn’t take any significance from this, despite the fact that most kids this young are merely parroting their parents. This is Austin, the San Francisco of Texas, which always can be counted on to be majority Democrat, whatever the issue, while the rest of the state reliably votes Republican. Of perhaps more significance is the class consensus on Hilarity: Says Mr. B.: "She only cried to make people feel sorry for her." The class wasn’t fooled.

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Posted in Texana

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Still my favorite

Posted on January 24, 2008 | Comments Off on Still my favorite

Happy, Texas, the Town Without A Frown. (They didn’t like the movie, either.) And similar locations ’round about the Lone Star for y’all. (And Bob Wills is still the king.)

Via Miss Cellania 

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Posted in Texana

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Requiem for a whitetail

Posted on January 10, 2008 | Comments Off on Requiem for a whitetail

Is it better to die from a hunter’s bullet or an arrow? Either one would seem preferable to what actually happened to this nine-point buck northwest of Dalhart in the Texas Panhandle:

"…the magnificent buck in the prime of life merely limps in painful increments from the feeder to the tall grass, the grass to live oak, live oak to cedar and, finally, out of sight."

Mike Leggett, the Austin daily’s often-eloquent outdoors writer, describes the sad end of a whitetail buck. 

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Posted in Texana

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Why yes, they can take your land

Posted on December 18, 2007 | Comments Off on Why yes, they can take your land

A tale of eminent domain in a small Texas town: If they can’t pull the rug out from under your property immediately–with help from the U.S. Supreme Court–they’ll make your bankruptcy imminent by tying you up in court forever:

"Freeport abandoned its plan for a private marina–only to unveil a plan for a public marina that would also need much of the Gores’ land. As ‘Bulldozed’ closes, the two sides are heading back to the courthouse once more."

Bulldozed, the book, available here. Looks like a natural subject for Hollyweird–as the Texas Observer demonstrates–if they can shake their preference for poor-soldier epics and zombie movies. 

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Posted in Texana

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Helping players wee-wee

Posted on November 28, 2007 | Comments Off on Helping players wee-wee

Hard as it is to imagine a football coach saying "wee-wee," that’s the legend of how the popular (nay, ubiquitous) sports drink of Gatorade came to be, according to its inventor, Dr. J. Robert Cade, who died yesterday in Florida. He was 80. The first concoction wasn’t so good, though. Native Texan Cade, who graduated from UT Southwestern medical school in Dallas, vomited.

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Posted in Obituaries, Scribbles

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Southwest Airlines

Posted on August 8, 2007 | Comments Off on Southwest Airlines

I hate flying, but when I have to fly I always try to book Southwest. It’s partly nostalgia. Back in the 1970s and 1980s, they were the "national airline of Texas" and their Boeing 737s were full of friendly Texans flying around the state. Now that they’ve expanded across the country, the passengers are no longer so friendly, as they are a mix from everywhere, including places where people are used to snarling at each other. But I still like Southwest’s "no crash" policy. They’ve never had one. And the free peanuts and soda. Other airlines, American for instance, the terrorists’ favorite, make you buy them.

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Posted in Texana

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Texas vs Iraq

Posted on July 21, 2007 | Comments Off on Texas vs Iraq

I keep reading that Iraq, variously, is either as big as Texas, twice as big, or half again as big. That didn’t seem right, so I searched the Web. That didn’t help much as I kept running into similar comparisons–all to the effect that Iraq is bigger. Finally, I found the National Georgraphic’s site with a square mileage comparison: Iraq, with about 168,000 square miles, is 62 percent the size of Texas, with 268,000 square miles. That’s more like it. Of course, much of Iraq is desert. But, then, so is much of Texas.

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Posted in Iraq, Scribbles

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