Random thoughts before 2008 kicks it

Sam:
Picking up heavier and heavier stuff. And throwing it farther and farther. And usually at the cat.

Cotton Bowl:
I'm nervous. Tech tends to start out slow in bowl games, then catches fire at the end. I don't know if that'll be enough this time. I'll be yelling enough to scare the neighbors anyway. Onward, ye Raiders of Red.

Speaking of football:
Here's a funny sketch that answers the question, what if you personified all the Big 12 schools, and had them throw a New Year's party? (I'm constantly asking myself such questions.) Dirty language warning.

To tell you where this site is coming from, Mizzou and Kansas State come off as the most normal, which is kind of laughable. I'll warn Aggie fans, A&M is given the role of Boo Radley. I also took some umbrage at the insults flung in Shiner Bock's direction.

Still speaking of football:
DoubleTNation pointed out this video preview of Mike Leach's upcoming interview on 60 minutes. Should be fun. Hope he's still working for us by then.


Watch CBS Videos Online


Kinda still speaking of football, which means the Cowboys:
I like Tony Romo. The fact that he refuses to go into an emotional meltdown solely to satisfy the postgame media is a good, good thing. We need more people to basically say that a football game is what it is. And especially that it really isn't that important.

I agree with Randy Galloway, who says you really can't get a decent read on how good or bad anyone on this team is, because Jerry Jones meddles with everything, and makes terrible decisions in the process. And until he steps away -- which he won't until he's five years dead -- the team is never going to be anything other than a bit better than average.

I also disagree with Galloway, who dismisses any notion that the media is too hard or overreacts to everything that happens to the Cowboys. You try spending a year with thousands of people shoving a microphone in your face and second-guessing every decision or analyzing every quote down to the last syllable and latin root, and then say you don't feel mentally tired.

T.O. seems like a jerk. I don't care. If he catches the ball and scores, other people I like can jump up and down and dump Gatorade on each other. It's not complicated. Good Lord, from the endless moaning I hear from all quarters, it's like we need to resurrect Freud and get the entire Texas sports media to sit down and talk about Troy Aikman and their mother.

Speaking of Shiner:
Tonight I got a six-pack of blond, along with New Year's champagne, to tide me over during the Cotton Bowl. I understand that Shiner Blond is actually the original beer created in Shiner, and therefore the most authentic to its Texas roots. Of course, a guy from Oklahoma told me that, so you don't know ...

The official News from Hico list of beer preferences:

1. Some $10-a-bottle junk that has a picture of a monk or a court jester on it.*
2. Give me a Rahr.
3. Got any Shiner?
4. Miller Light.
5. Bud whatever.
6. Give me a glass of water and punch me twice in the face.
7. Coors Light.

* Don't drink that often, so I make it special when I do.

Travian:
I'm currently playing a free internet based game called Travian. I'm not providing the link, and am therefore doing you a favor.

Resolutions:
Will make some time somewhere to go backpacking in Far West Texas on some trail I've never tried before. And to be a good father and husband.

Happy New Year
And remember not to get shot.

Good point on newspaper and the intertubes

A paper shuns the web. Publisher says putting content on the web for free is stupid.

And the paper is making double-digit profits and just published its largest edition ever.

From the New York Times.

It is, of course, a newspaper with a staff of 3.5 people, and is therefore almost wholly local.

But, really, it makes sense. Why would you give away your product for free, in the exact same format where other organizations are kicking your tail?

Worst combination of light saber/holiday special ever

Vanity Fair talks to some of the people behind perhaps one of the worst things ever to be on TV, the Star Wars Holiday Special.

Some interesting stories, such as the fact that Princess Leia didn't just sing, she demanded that she sing. Otherwise, you notice how everybody still refuses to take responsibility for it.

I have a fuzzy memory of the show when it aired. I remember it coming on, being thrilled when Skywalker made an appearance, and then ... Well, the other members of my family drifted off. And I didn't put up too much of a fight to change the channel.

The piece points out why things were so bad -- the writers tried to combine a serious Lucas-created plot with the usual schmaltzy holiday special-type fare.

You can't really watch it now for the kitschy fun of it. It's just too boring, unless 10 minutes of wookies talking to each other, with no translation, is your idea of fun.

Rocket ships and horsees

This one was too much fun not to pass on:

Bureaucracies live forever. So the next time you are handed a specification/Procedure/Process and wonder “What horse’s ass came up with it?” you may be exactly right. Imperial Roman army chariots were made just wide enough to accommodate the rear ends of two war horses. (Two horses’ asses.)

Here’s the twist. When you see a Space Shuttle sitting on its launch pad, there are two big booster rockets attached to the sides of the main fuel tank. These are solid rocket boosters, or SRB’s. The SRB’s are made by Thiokol at their factory in Utah. The engineers who designed the SRB’s would have preferred to make them a bit fatter, but the SRB’s had to be shipped by train from the factory to the launch site.

The railroad line from the factory happens to run through a tunnel in the mountains, and the SRB’s had to fit through that tunnel. The tunnel is slightly wider than the railroad track, and the railroad track, as you now know, is about as wide as two horses’ behinds.

Let's begin Christmas week ...

With the great Texas song writer Robert Earl Keen ...


Hmmm ... Robert Earl seems to have put on a little weight.

And in other news ...

No wonder the prairie dogs have been actin' funny.
Along with other fields and playgrounds across the nation, Odessa's famous football field is sick with lead. To me, the strangest part of the story is that China apparently has nothing to do with it.


At least they didn't go nuts with *&*%#@ exclamation points.
The Abilene Reporter-News is saying nah-nah to the city's marketing department. The paper ran a poll that asked Abilenicans if they preferred the city's new marketing slogan, "Abilene Frontiering," or Fort Worth's new slogan, "You get it, when you get here."

Voters heavily favored Fort Worth's slogan 90% to 10%. The poll even got the Star-Telegram's attention. I don't know. The paper's kinda kicking a dead mule there, but I agree it's not a great slogan.

Abilene has a history of adding random exclamation points to name events, supposedly to make them sound more exciting, but everyone knows that the guy who screams all the time is eventually the guy you ignore the most. And so people see the "Celebrate Abilene!" festival and the "Frontier Texas!" road signs and just shrug their shoulders.

(I should also add that it's a real nightmare for copy editors, forced to "correct" a perfectly correct phrase by making it incorrect. I remember having to write "Celebrate Abilene! will feature face painting this year." As if that sentence deserves an exclamation point.)

This time they've made up a word -- "Frontiering." I don't mind people occasionally adding a word to the language, but "frontiering" in this sense does not mean putting ma and pa in a wagon and going off to fight Injuns for the farm. "Frontiering" in this context means putting your surly, suburbian kids in the car and going to look at old stuff. And maybe buy new cheap stuff that looks like the old stuff.

Kinda takes the ooomph out of the word "frontier."


And that's what we do
I just realized that this blog has been real heavy lately on West Texas, football, and West Texas football. Then I looked at the name of this blog. "Duh," I said.

Sammy Baugh, RIP

Arguably the greatest quarterback who ever lived passed away Wednesday in Rotan.

I don't have a personal Sammy Baugh story, and I didn't even learn who he was until I was in high school. It was easy, however, to get your own personal Sammy Baugh story. All you had to do was drive up to his farm house outside of Sweetwater and honk your horn. He'd come out, take you inside, give you a drink, and talk for hours -- without having any idea who you were. Buddy Jeremy spent an afternoon at Baugh's place for an Avalanche-Journal story, about a week after Peyton Manning had been flown in for a photo shoot.

Robert Duvall copied Baugh's mannerisms to portray Gus McCrae in the Lonesome Dove miniseries.

He was a great quarterback, but having someone who combined his fame with gregariousness and a laid-back attitude made Baugh a model for West Texans, someone people were proud to have in the extremely large metaphorical back yard of the region.

A south plains moment

Guess where this happened ...


Highlight below for answer.
Brought to you by Queensland, Australia.
Always wanted to go there. Seems kinda like home.
The video calls it a tumbleweed vortex. If Hitchcock ever wanted to make a movie in Texas, he missed a great title.

Of Santa and sadness: Terry Pratchett’s illness

I heard the news a couple of weeks ago that my favorite living writer has been diagnosed with early onset Alzheimer’s Disease.

Terry Pratchett writes the Discworld series, a line of humorous fantasy books that I’d like to write my master’s thesis on, if I ever get around to it. The series is that good – as in that funny and that deep and that imaginative.

I stumbled onto the series about three years ago, and have been working my way through it since. I didn’t write anything here after I heard about Pratchett's Alzheimer’s, as it was announced several months ago and writing news travels slow.

His website’s here. They have a link to speech he gave to a disease research group, which is kinda heartbreaking to watch because he’s funny and everyone in the room is too sad to laugh.

Anyway, my own story little of how a good writer can affect your life:

A few years back at the Abilene Reporter-News, we had an intern on the copy desk from Oklahoma U. Smart guy – the college intellectual type you’d expect to see wearing a Che T-shirt in a most definitely not-ironic-to-him kind of way.

One night I heard him in an argument with another copy editor, who was teasing him because he had recently announced that he would never tell his children about Santa Claus. "Because I will NEVER lie to my children."

I didn’t join in, just thought about what a serious, humorless childhood is in store for some kid in the future. But the question remained with me – why teach kids about Santa? Tradition? It’s a fun thing to do? Tradition?

A couple of months ago, I Netflixed the Pratchett books that had been turned into films. (All the films are terrible, by the way.) The best was Hogfather, a live-action take on Pratchett’s bizarre take on the Santa myth.

As mentioned, it wasn’t a good movie, but it made a point that I’ll remember. Borrowing from the phraseology that’s still in my head, it went something like:

You can sift through every inch and all the matter that makes up the universe, and you’ll never find a single atom of justice or compassion. These things exist only because men believe in them. And before you can believe in the big things, you have to be taught to believe in the small things.

It’s a great sentiment. A guy who writes about what trolls drink to get drunk came up with it.

And a moment of focused hope ...

Update: Mules win.

For another West Texas town. Muleshoe is playing today in its first state championship game. This is a long-odds, never-saw-it-coming deal, for one of the best little towns of the South Plains.





Give 'em hell.


Another story brought to me by the Avalanche-Journal's George Watson.

Everyone please remove their hats and take a freakishly large moment of silence

The man they called "Hoss" would've been 80 years old Wednesday.

Dan Blocker's hometown O'Donnell, which I understand has a museum exhibit in his honor, recognized the event, and will recognize it some more this weekend, according to the Avalanche-Journal.

True story -- this morning my wife got back from shopping, and noted, "It was slim pickens at the bread store today." And I had this brief vision of Slim going over the baked apple pies and expressing consternation at the Boboli. Then I remembered his glorious beatdown with Hoss on Bonanza, pretty much my favorite TV western fight in anything until Deadwood.

And then the A-J reminded me it was Hoss's b-day.


Fight starts at 4:47.

Note: The A-J reporter meant to refer to Hoss as a "gentle giant" but added an "i" in the wrong spot, thus noting that Hoss was a large man of the Christian persuasion (since corrected). Several people showed up to jeer in the story's comment section, thus hacking off this former copy editor. I feel the urge to show some surliness.

Snow hits Houston

You know, in some parts of the state, people may say that hell really has frozen over.

Not me, of course. Just some people. In some parts of the state.

On the other hand, an El Paso high school team made it to the area round of the football playoffs this year, so very strange things are happening.

Sagitarians (Sagitarriuses?) get off to a great start

So my wife read me perhaps the most doom-laden "If your birthday is today" bit I've ever heard, in this morning's Star-Telegram horoscope section. It said basically, "You no longer listen to anyone, you jerk. And don't even think about making any major changes until next year."

Then I read in the news that I share my birthday with a very special someone:

Gov. Blagojevich was born December 10, 1956, on the Northwest side of Chicago.

A spree of obscenities would be fitting here, but I fear my future employers will read this someday.

Gun Loaded? Check. Pepper-spray? Check. Riot shield? Check. All right, we're off to see the robot mouse.

Greatness in the Wall Street Journal, on the rash of violence at Chuck E. Cheeses.

"The biggest problem is you have a bunch of adults acting like juveniles," says Town of Brookfield Police Capt. Timothy Imler. "There's a biker bar down the street, and we rarely get calls there."

The primary cause? I blame the fact that children of baby boomers are now trying to raise kids, and are doing so poorly.

Small thoughts, small posts

And the rest were about Christmas costumes for dogs ...

Standing in the Wal-Mart checkout line the other day, looking at the magazines and tabloids. Hmmm ... let's see ... one ... two ... three ... four ... five. Five magazines with Britney Spears prominently on the cover. Three about her on drugs or gaining weight. One about her turning over a new leaf. And one about Kevin Federline turning over a new leaf after his ex-wife got on drugs and gained weight. Of course there might have been more, but I couldn't see all the covers.


Cranfills Gap goes to Vegas

Yaay. Maybe you've heard of the promotion -- people from Las Vegas searched for a town that would be entertaining to take gambling, and they settled on this little crossroads about 20 miles away from Hico. My only reaction was -- of course. Reality shows (and lately, reality-PR campaigns) have been happening with such regularity in the Cross Timbers region that people are going to start counting on it as part of the economy.

The reasons for the attention: The people are genuine when they say things like "all hat and no cattle." They make for good pictures when they see a dancing woman in a sparkly headdress and nothing else except for a few well-placed nickels. ("Well, gosh," they might say. Or perhaps "Yee-haw." Makes good commercial dialogue.)

I also think that they keep going to the Cross Timbers because, as a population, the people have a pretty good ratio of the ugly to the good-looking. As opposed to, say, Missouri, where the ratio is about 80-20 in the wrong direction.


Tom Bodet -- not dead, yet spinning in his grave

Motel 6 is changing its look to something its CEO describes as Eurochic.

I heard the roar of a billion rolling eyes.


Christmas shopping. Easier.

Don't know if it's good or bad, but since everyone in our family just buys each other gift cards, the buying of presents this year was easier than ever, and is already over. At least that's what's my wife tells me. I had nothing to do with it.


Fall semester ends

And boy is my brain tired.


Happy mark-your-approach-to-death day, to me

I'm posting this shot not so much to let people know that my b-day is soon, so much as to show off Meredith's cupcakes. She made them from scratch and referred to the recipe -- a devil's food cake -- as "intimadating." They came out mighty tasty. Meredith was proud. Proud enough to demand I post a picture. So, here ya go.

Picture of fire

These were taken at the annual family eatathon in Hico. At which Sam got his first look at two of the funnest things in the whole wide world ...

Fire!

This experience was accompanied by a great deal of "Hey! Back! No touch! No touch! Danger! Hot!"

And offroad vehicles

The boy definitely loves the machinery with wheels. We have a children's book that has nothing in it but pictures of things that "Go." Sam's brought it to us so many times that we've started running in the other direction anytime he bends down to pick it up.

We also did a grandchildren/college affiliation shot. (A few Baylor kids would have been perfect for the season, but ain't none of us that rich.) Everyone took a shot and my Mom's planning on using the best for this year's Christmas cards.

This is my best. Eh. A few of the children got caught at an awkward moment.

After looking at this picture, I remembered that we had an impromptu kickball game that afternoon. All family members not in this shot suffered age-related injuries.