Sentimental journey, in two parts

Part 1 – Joining Facebook

The last few years, I had been happy to stay off of Facebook the way some people had been happy to not have a mobile phone:

• I can live without it.
• It’s a big distraction.
• It’s part practical device, part vanity project.

I knew plenty of folks on Facebook, and heard about everyone else who was there and how they were reconnecting and meeting people blah blah blah.

And I resisted. Do I need new friends? Why should I try to virtually collect them? I have five good friends. I don’t need any more.

Besides, Blogspot has been an excellent outlet for the writing. I post something here, we don’t have to be buddies for you to read it.

The problem has been a rising sense of sentimentality (see next post) within me over the last few months. I generally think that Sentimentality can suck eggs -- so long as I can wax poetic about the middle ages, West Texas, Texas Tech sports, and kicking field goals.

I blame Dave for pushing me over the edge. Last week, Dave posted about his favorite Austin bar shutting down, and it left me thinking of my youthful experiences of doing stupid, ignorant things to kill precious time ... and suddenly I was thinking that song in my head:

Memories,
Of things that happened in the past,
Misty, Skittle-colored,
Memories,
Of the way we ...

And I realized that I had given Facebook my name and e-mail address, and was staring at the personal profile page.

"Eh, what the hell."

So I filled out the basic information – city, college, high school – and Facebook gave me a few alternatives for finding friends. Then I did the bad thing I didn’t want to do – I clicked on the link that showed people from my high school senior class, and I scrolled down, rendering judgment:

Never knew her ... Never knew her ... Balder than me ... fatter than me ... richer than me ... Vaguely remember ... Nice hat ... ugly baby ... That’s a lot of cleavage for a wedding dress ... Paris? La-di-freakin’-da ... Pretty wife ... Good match ... Dude, college was two decades ago. You can stop trying to look like a frat boy ... Don’t remember ... Oh my! Look what happened to Miss Ain’t-I-All-That! (Snap fingers while making diagonal motions with arm, until deep sense of shame causes me to stop.) ...

And so on and so forth. So far I’ve been disciplined enough not to look up ex-girlfriends and the ones that coulda been ex-girlfriends. But my wife says it’s a matter of time.

Pulling myself away from the class list, I went and found a profile picture – something that would make people think I was wealthy and holding on to my sense of hipness. Basically, a visual lie.

Later, I sent friend requests to the folks that I e-mail on a regular basis*, my childhood friends, and left it there to bloom. And it’s gone a little nuts.

I’m getting notes from people I haven’t seen in decades, it’s kind of fun. But the problem is, what happens when you get a note from somebody that you were kind of friends with and who now lives maybe two blocks from your house? What happens when you get a friend request to someone you only vaguely remember as someone else’s girlfriend?

Are you obligated to meet them? Do you have to sum up the past 20 years of your life to a relative stranger?

They ought to have a button to push that says “Let’s do lunch.”

*At least the ones I could find. If you’re on Facebook and haven’t heard from me, let me know.

Still here

Just kind of cocooning right now. (You know. Thinking about stuff, like things, you know.)

Enjoy the Star Wars trilogy told by someone who's never seen it.

See more funny videos and TBT Videos at Today's Big Thing.

Comments

Starbuck calls her "Stardoe"
Goodness gracious. Dirk Benedict, the original Starbuck on the original Battlestar Gallactica, rips the present incarnation of the show on the conservative site Big Hollywood. The tone of the piece will offend most women, and probably all men born after 1980.

It's funny. I kinda like Benedict's piece, even though I disagree with just about everything in it. The latest Battlestar Gallactica was my favorite show until they lost me in the third season. (I hear the fourth is better.)

I dunno. I like rants.


Yes, you can have fun in Vegas
"Do you know where Cranfills Gap is?"

The question came from my father-in-law, who was visiting over the weekend. He expects me to have a store of West Texas knowledge.

And of course I know where it is -- all of 30 miles southeast of Hico.

My father-in-law told me he had learned about the town on the web and watched some of the commercials. Then I remembered -- or realized that I had forgotten -- about the place and how the town had won a trip to Las Vegas as part of a promotion.

They now have episodes of the trip up on a visit Vegas web site. I guess the best term for it is "reality advertising." The bits have some cute moments in them -- lots of people saying "yeehaw," old women acting inappropriately with male strippers, etc. My favorite part is when an old man refers to the bubbling wine as "cham-PAG-nee."

It's nice, but what struck me about the trip was that the Cranfills Gap people were given the full VIP treatment. They stayed in the luxury suites, ate at the best restaurants, got free trips to the day spas.

In other words, they got a vacation that 99 percent of us could never afford. The overall effect is like watching an ad that explains the good points of winning the lottery.


Friday Night Lights
The season premier Friday was a whole lot of awesome. I'll admit I felt kinda cheated. The show stopped in midseason last year, and they didn't bother settling all of the plot points before starting this season.

On the other hand, the plot points of the last season were never that strong in the first place. Nerd guy Landry kills guy, joins football team, dates hottest girl in school. Uh-huh.

I like the idea of nerd-quarterback getting competition from new stud-boy quarterback; I enjoy watching the white-trash girl claw her way towards college; and I hope that Smash gets his Mojo back.

Which is why the show is great. These are real characters they've created. You care about what happens to them.

I don't get how Lyla bounced from good Christian girl to not-so-much girl, but, whatever. Half of the show's charm comes from the feeling that it's all about to fall apart.

Hallucinations can be fun

John sent me a blog post from the Dallas Morning News Technology Blog(?) on coffee.

It seems that drinking coffee can stave off alzheimer's, but it will also give you a higher chance of suffering hallucinations.

Nothing else to add here, tho I'm waiting to see what the blog has to say about the health effects of eating a five-pound bag of Cheetos every day.

Now You May Type! With Honor!

Jeremy sent me this ad for -- great blessed Shatner -- a keyboard that uses Klingon.

Funny how Klingon would develop 26 letters, just like English. They're on a different planet or something.

Craddick

The other day, me and my wife were discussing the outster of Tom Craddick as speaker of the Texas House. (We usually discuss these things because the only other conversational option is the state of the fluids coming out of our child's body.)

He always seemed, according to virtually every news source out there, to be an honery old cuss that bogged down practically every initiative. He somehow managed to rule with an iron fist, and at the same time prove wildly inefficient.

It hit me then: "So now the Texas Legislature might be able to do the things it wants to do."

Me and Meredith looked at each other, ominous movie music playing in our heads.

Dude. Look what Brown can do for you.

A story sent to me by Scott, detailing an incident in my alma mater's hometown:

30-pound marijuana brick delivered to wrong address in Denton

Sure to be nationwide news before lunch.

Updates, notes, TV and whatnot ...

It's one of those things where I haven't written for so long, I got too much stuff on my mind and not enough energy to write it.

First, with the whatnot ...

A video that combines the two great passions of dog lovers and those who like the movie "Grease."


"Woof" is the word. Haha! Kill me!

Updates:
-- Grandad had surgery Monday. They basically went in and did their best to clean out his lungs. And he seems to be recovering pretty well and will hopefully be able to go back home soon. He's 94, and a tough, tough man.

-- School begins Wednesday. I'm taking calculus, and wondering about the ratio of out-of-shape body to out-of-shape mind. Perhaps it's inverse. Exponentially so, even. I can hope.

I'm nervous about the subject matter, but my focus has been shifting over the Christmas break. I'm mainly thinking about just where in God's name I'm going to end up this fall and how I'm going to do at teaching basic geometry, factorization and whatever to 13-year-olds. The closer you get to the actual thing, the more you worry about it, wonder about what road blocks are going to be thrown in your way.


TV
-- In case you missed it, and you probably did, the Food Network covered Hico's Texas Steak Championship Cook-off and aired the piece earlier this month. I haven't seen the clip, as we don't have cable and the Food Network hasn't bothered to put it on the internet.

Still, as this blog calls itself "News from Hico" -- even though it has little to do with actual news in the actual town of Hico -- I felt kinda obligated to mention it.

-- For me, two great programming events happen this week. First off, Rifftrax, the web site that was formally the people behind MST3K, is doing a live riff at 8 p.m. today (Thursday), online. For free. The guys are just riffing on a short, educational film, but I still feel the need for popcorn.

Secondly, Friday Night Lights finally premieres on Friday. It's about *@&*%^$ time. This show had some serious problems before the writer's strike shut it down last year. A lot of the plot exists just to give some characters face time, and the show generally seems to be flailing along without any overall storyline to drive the action. Also, the marketing angle of the show has given me a man-crush on the guy who plays Tim Riggins, which I find disturbing.

Still, it's the best West-Texas-based show on TV today.


Notes
-- This computer is just about dead. Tends to lock-up once every 15 minutes, causing me to -- Oh, you're kidding me. It locked up as I was typing that sentence. Arh.

-- Ricardo Montalban insert your own Khan or Fantasy Island joke here. Still, you got to admit the guy was likable. Made me smile anytime I saw him. I remember the joke Burt Reynolds made on the Tonight Show.

"You can't lock Montalban alone in a room, because he'd literally charm himself to death."

RIP.

-- Eh. I should get back to studying. Happy Thursday.

Just a note on the inactivity around here

A lot of things have been happening lately to keep me distracted -- we've been dealing with the holidays, I've been trying to cram in work on my internet teacher certification during the time off from school, etc.

But two things have kept my mind off of blogging. My Dad recently had an "episode" or something, though it sounds like a mini-stroke. It happened before Christmas, and he's had some difficulty talking, walking and using his left hand. It's hard for anyone in my family to see this.

On the other hand, Dad being Dad, he's just kind of shrugged the whole thing off and kept on doing what he does. And he's rapidly gotten better -- he was almost back to normal when I saw him two days ago.

The other thing is my Grandad ending up at the hospital in ICU on Wednesday with pneumonia. The doctors have indicated that his health is failing, just how badly we'll know after some tests come back next week.

It's sad for everyone, but Grandad's had some health difficulties for a while, and at age 93, you kinda have to consider every day to be a gift. On the plus side, he's been lucky enough to have kept his mind in good shape. When I saw him in ICU, I asked him how he felt and he said he was good except for the pneumonia. Then we got into a discussion over which sister of mine the nurse most closely resembled.

It's wierd how you get into a routine and then everything just falls down on you, like big cars being dropped on you by renegade aliens in a dumb movie. (Eh, metaphor bank is empty right now.)

On Wednesday, Vivi (of V Marks the Spot) happened to be passing through and droppped by for a short visit and to see Sam. Hadn't seen her in about five years. Then our water heater goes kaput, and we have to spend the morning trying to get a plumber out. Then Meredith's sister and husband come by before they ship out to Virginia. Meredith's parents were coming, but they had to cancel at the last minute. Then I get the call about Grandad being ill.

Seemed I had spent the last month doing nothing but taking care of Sam, gaining weight, and then trying to lose weight.

This isn't a blog where I lay down my troubles and send angry missives to God. This is a blog where I pick out aspects of life to inspect and go "Ha!" Or talk about Tech football.

But since my audience basically consists of about 8 old friends and random people looking for information on dead cougars, I'd thought I'd let y'all know what was going on.

Yes. The Cotton Bowl did suck. Thanks for asking.

Good riddance to that beat down piece of junk.

Anyway. If you could write a script as to how to take a team from the middle ranks of college football all the way to the elite and then back down to where they started, in only one season, you'd have the '08 Texas Tech Red Raiders.

I'm not going into analysis right now. I'm not that insightful and other people are already doing it better. At least we get to keep Coach Leach. Yaay.

I'm off. Tequila needs to be shot and video game nazis must die.

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.