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.