Showing posts with label Texas. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Texas. Show all posts

Thursday, March 12, 2015

One standard or two? We report; you decide.

http://www.cbsnews.com/news/dallas-home-of-university-of-oklahoma-student-who-led-racist-chant-draws-protesters/

It had to happen.

Protesters took to the street outside the Dallas home of the N-word spewing SAE frat boys at Oklahoma, chanting slogans and, according to one neighbor, accusing the entire neighborhood of being a hotbed of racism.

Accompanying the protest were a couple dozen reporters and several cops. From CBS News:

Dozens of protesters took to the street in front of the home of a former University of Oklahoma student and fraternity member who was shown in a video leading a racist chant aboard a bus.

Dozens of demonstrators Wednesday evening marched up and down the North Dallas residential street in front of the home of Parker Rice. Watching them were about two dozen news media representatives and six police officers.

The protesters chanted, "Racism is taught," and, "Racism is a choice."

CBS Dallas reported that the group, Next Generation Action Network, says Rice and Highland Park-graduate Levi Pettit, another SAE member seen in the OU video and now also expelled from the university, made a bold statement that was caught on tape and now it time for protesters to make theirs.

Their numbers didn't pack the street, but their message was heard loud and clear. "This is what democracy looks like," they chanted. "Teach your kids another way, no modern day KKK!"
THOUGHT EXPERIMENT: Is this Dallas protest proper, or is it harassment -- the creating of the same sort of "hostile environment" that University of Oklahoma officials alleged in kicking two (so far) Sigma Alpha Epsilon members out of school.

Would your answer to the question change if this were a bunch of anti-abortion protesters marching in the street outside the home of an abortionist? If so, why?

"Because one is bad and the other is good" is not an acceptable answer -- not before the law and not in today's morally relativistic philosophical soup, in which your "truth" may not be others' "truth."

Monday, June 16, 2014

Broadcasting, the way it was



Let's jump into our Internet time machine and travel back to a time when television was an event and radio mattered.

Let's set the controls for Austin, Texas, in December 1960 and take a look at a time long gone and KTBC radio and TV the way it was. The way we were. Before the bean counters and their fancy machines took over and turned  the broadcasting world upside down and inside out.

Enjoy.

Wednesday, May 07, 2014

Damn! Missed it by this much


Dammit, I missed the deep-fried meteorological cataclysm that laid (burp) waste to eastern Tejas the middle of last month.

To see this sort of display of extreme weather, I could become a storm chaser yesterday. All you need is a camera, the local radar on your smartphone and a carload of ketchup, salt, pepper and mustard.

And wet wipes. Lots of wet wipes to deal with the storm's (burp) aftermath.

Obviously, the ideal position to take as an onion-ring storm chaser would have been Wac(k)o, where I could have hunkered down in not-so-safe shelter with a case of Dr. Pepper.

I do love me some Dr. Pepper.


Obviously, I need to pay more attention to the World's Best Weatherman up yonder in Nova Scotia.


HAT TIP: Rod Dreher.

Saturday, January 04, 2014

Rammer jammer crazy hammer,
psychotic break, Alabama!


The world would be a better place if we could take all the Alabama fans and lock them in a domed stadium with, say, all the Texas fans for a football game, then let Darwin take his course.

With emphasis on "lock them in." 

 
UPDATE: It's just as awesome with the raw sound! As one YouTube commenter said before going off the rails (Hey! It's the YouTube comments section!), "Gumps gonna be Gumps!"

Thursday, April 18, 2013

Better living through chemistry

April 16, 1947 :
Texas City, Texas





April 17, 2013:
West, Texas


Twice in 66 years, the fertilizer that helps put more and cheaper food on your table also has blown up much of a Texas town.

Ammonium nitrate and fire don't mix. Large quantities of flaming ammonium nitrate and commercial or residential areas mix catastrophically.

When I was a kid, DuPont's ad slogan was "Better Things for Better Living . . . Through Chemistry." That may well be true, but that "better living" comes at a cost that well-off advertising executives are at little risk of having to pay.

THAT deadly check, when it comes, usually gets picked up by working-class folks in places like Texas City. Or West. Or my hometown, Baton Rouge.

You don't want to know what would happen if the entire Exxon-Mobil refinery there blew. We just found out what happens when a fertilizer plant blows in a town like West.

Not that we'll stop to count the costs of progress, however. That's just not the American Way.

Tuesday, November 13, 2012

When your president's a Muslin . . .

SECDEE!
Don Mason, via Flickr

. . . what the hell is a patroit supposed to do?

No, the troo patroit must secdee! Because we must detsroy this contrey inn order to save it!

Monday, July 30, 2012

Precocious preteen sucks worse than Roseanne


Parents who let an 11-year-old girl call herself a "singer-songwriter" and traipse through the Texas coffeehouse and showcase circuit need to have their heads examined.

Parents who let an 11-year-old white girl with an OK voice run around oversinging oversung Christina Aguilera and Beyoncé songs in public probably need to be horsewhipped.

And parents old enough to know better who let an 11-year-old girl who isn't do this to the national anthem at a major-league soccer game --
on television, no less -- need killin', to put it in their native Texan.


CONGRATULATIONS, asshats. There's now a rendition of the Star-Spangled Banner worse than Roseanne Barr's. It's your daughter's.

You were happy to bask in the reflected glow of your little darling's prepubescent musical specialness. So you put her out there. And put her out there. And put her out there some more, because the fruit of mama's womb turned out to be a singer-songwriter!

I mean, if her website says it, it must be true!

And then you put her out there, before tens of thousands in a stadium and many more than that on TV. What could go wrong with an 11-year-old white girl trying to outdo Whitney Houston's version of a song that to most singers is what invading Afghanistan is to most empires?

Because, by God, people are gonna remember Harper Gruzins from Coppell, Texas!


Well, you got that right. The national anthem done in the style of Tibetan throat singing would have been less memorable . . . and more palatable.

Sadly for you, there's no reflected glory to bathe yourselves in. Worse for Harper, there's no shortage of Texas-size ridicule for a precocious preteen to bear all by her Lone Star self.

Somebody git a rope!


HAT TIP: Rod Dreher.

Wednesday, April 18, 2012

Eveythang's bligger in Taxass Texuss here


Darren Rovell on WhoSay

And Arkansas breathes a deep sigh of blessed relief as Texas A&M enters the Southeastern Conference as only the Aggies could.

Of course, the College Station apparel maker responsible for the above shirt apologized profusely for its error-riddled product, saying that out of all the 57 states, it should have known that Pennsylvania never would have had an SEC school in it. It plans to issue a "corrected" tee adding Nebraska to the conference map.

Meantime, President Obama announced Tuesday that the Pentagon would immediately enhance U.S. security in Asia by assigning all Aggie cadets, upon graduation and commissioning, to the People's Liberation Army in China and the Korean People's Army in North Korea.

Texas A&M administrators have begun working out the logistics of busing the newly minted officers to Taipei and Seoul four times a year -- likely at the end of each semester.

Thursday, April 12, 2012

Oh, hail, no!


I'm sure there must be at least a few reasons why someone actually might wish to live in the Texas Panhandle. This is not one of them.

Those aren't boulders, and that's not a narrow grassy path through a lava field.

That's four feet of hail, with a gully carved through it by the runoff from another three inches of rain. That's not something the Amarillo-area chamber of commerce will want to be playing up as it tries to attract new residents.



NOT THAT anyone would believe such a thing -- even about Texas.
Sure, everything's bigger in Texas. But 4 feet of hail from one storm? That's what the National Weather Service, the Texas Department of Transportation and a local sheriff say happened Wednesday in an area north of Amarillo when hail piled up in drifts so wide they cut off a major highway.

The National Weather Service office in Amarillo even posted a photo on its Facebook page, but that wasn't enough to convince skeptics.

"Serious do not think this is 100% hail!!!" commented one person.

"It's a lite dusting of hail on some damn rocks," said another person, referring to the image of a firefighter standing next to what could be taken for boulders.

"I can assure you we do not have big rocks like that in West Texas," Krissy Scotten, a spokeswoman for the weather service office in Amarillo, told msnbc.com.
WELL, at least that's something.

Tuesday, March 13, 2012

It was just an educational tool

Face it: your body is confusing. But it’s important to get to know your body — where things are, how things work, and how to care for yourself — so you can make good decisions about your sexual health.

You don't need to worry about whether your breasts, penis, vulva, or any other parts of your body are normal. When it comes to our bodies, different IS normal. Here's how different our bodies can be.




The local head of Planned Parenthood no doubt was just trying to explain to the fine folks of Lubbock, Texas, that "different is normal."

I mean, if this week's allegations align with the naked truth, it wouldn't surprise anyone.

Right?


Unfortunately for Tony Thornton, the oppressive forces of ignorance -- otherwise known as Lubbock police -- were in no mood to celebrate our bodies (or their diversity) and threw him into the county lockup, alleging indecent exposure. According to the cops, the guardian of local sexual health was showing God and everybody
just how normal was his (ahem) "body."

At 3:30 in the afternoon.


At the baseball fields in a local park.


ADMIRABLY, local television station KCBD refrained from any cracks about "bats and balls" or "bringing the wood."
The CEO and President of the Planned Parenthood Association of Lubbock has been arrested for exposing himself in public. Lubbock police say Tony Thornton, 56, was arrested just before 3:30 Monday afternoon at the baseball fields inside of Mackenzie Park.

He was arrested for indecent exposure and transported to the Lubbock County Detention Center where he remained until 11 a.m. Tuesday, when he posted a bond of $750.

According to a receptionist who answered the telephone at Planned Parenthood's office Tuesday afternoon, Thornton was out of the office for the entire day. Tuesday evening, KCBD NewsChannel 11 went to Thornton's home, but he did not answer the door.

According to Texas Penal Code 21.08, indecent exposure is committed when a suspect exposes his genitals with the intent to arouse the sexual desire of another person. It's a class B misdemeanor.
NEITHER Thornton nor Planned Parenthood's national office had any comment.

Neither was there any word on whether the accused Planned Parenthood executive would be pleading "educational outreach" or "practicing for a new teen sex-ed video."

Monday, March 12, 2012

When Aspies do social activism


I'll take the Third World, please.

Once upon a time, before Hurricane Katrina washed away much of New Orleans, I'll bet this man was known to all as Mister Clarence. Mister Clarence probably didn't have much, but he had a home . . . and he had the dignity of being Mister Clarence.

Back before
le déluge, New Orleans was as Third World as it gets in what we fancy as the First, but at least it still had the dignity -- more or less -- of hearth, home and red beans and rice on Monday. Folks also had the dignity of being a someone instead of a something.

After Katrina, though, Mister Clarence ended up without a house, and he ended up in Austin, Texas. And he ended up homeless, just another nameless and unwelcome face.


AT THIS WEEK'S South by Southwest Interactive conference, though, Clarence is a hot commodity. To be precise, he's a hot-spot commodity -- desired not as a person but, instead, as Clarence the Homeless Hotspot.

Believe it or not, this is supposed to be pro-homeless activism of some sort. Many were not amused. Neither was I.

Well, I suppose it's a step up from being Clarence the Homeless Public Restroom and having to carry a urinal on your back all day. Praise God for small blessings -- like geeks not being much attracted to the plumbing-fixtures industry.

And praise God for our Third World enclaves. After we have forgotten, at long last, everything about what it was like to be human, we still will have these benighted places where we might rediscover --
as we dodge the gunshots in the ruins -- the things we used to know.

Tuesday, September 06, 2011

Realignment, as seen on Twitter

Click on picture for higher resolution

Wow! The inside dope on college athletics you can find on the Internets!

Tuesday, August 16, 2011

The seditionist in our midst


The presidential candidacy of Texas Gov. Rick Perry reminds one that the Alien and Sedition Acts were not 100-percent bad things.

The former Air Force pilot intimates that the president of the United States is less than patriotic -- and by extension 90 percent of Americans over 18 -- because he didn't volunteer for military service as a young man. And then he says that Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke, first appointed by President George W. Bush, would be doing something akin to treason by "printing more money to play politics at this particular time in American history."

He added that they know how to handle the likes of quantitative easers in the Lone Star Republic: “I don’t know what y’all would do to him in Iowa, but we would treat him pretty ugly down in Texas.”


I WONDER whether Texas jurisprudence for an "almost treacherous — or treasonous" Fed head would include yelling "Christ-killer" at the Jewish "moneychanger" while the mob . . . er, justice committee strung him up.

If Rick Perry exemplifies what passes for electoral politics in Texas, perhaps secession isn't such a bad idea, after all. Maybe Texas should secede sooner and not later.

In fact, maybe Texas ought not let the door hit it in the ass on the way out of the Union.

And maybe President Obama ought to give Bernanke the honor of pulling the trigger on the Hellfire missile when just another traitor -- albeit a high-value treasonous target on America's southern flank -- gets his.

Because the "ugly" you sow is the ugly you damn well ought to reap.

Monday, August 15, 2011

Heil myself!


If you're a Republican governor of Texas who likes to speak coyly of secession and loudly about enemies of the people, and if you like to have great big rallies featuring eccentric preachers, and if you figure it might be fun to run for president . . . don't do this.

Especially in front of the photographers.



Or this.


And for God's sake, don't do this.

Friday, August 12, 2011

Just another day in the Big 12 10 9


Sorry, but if you're not from around these parts, you have absolutely no idea how much we Nebraskans are enjoying the continuing implosion of the Big 12 Conference.

Uh . . . 10.

Uh . . . 9?

Anyway, let's just say we told you so.

Thursday, August 11, 2011

President of where?


So, of which country does Rick Perry want to be president? Tejas or los Estados Unidos?

The present gobernador de Tejas hasn't exactly been clear in his documented remarks on the subject, according to
The Texas Tribune (La Tribuna de Tejas):
“He has said many times that we have a great union, and he believes it should stay that way,” Miner said. Miner reviewed the YouTube clip and said it was clear Perry was speaking to people in his office but that he could not “verify the audio or the video that was put together.”

However, well-known tech blogger Robert Scoble told The Texas Tribune on Tuesday that he remembers the meeting with Perry in the governor’s office in 2009. It's clear from interviews, blogs and Twitter postings that the remarks were recorded nearly a month before the April Tea Party gathering, which helped launch Perry’s successful 2010 re-election effort.

In the meeting, Perry can be heard speaking to the group of tech bloggers about the founding of Texas in 1836. A slideshow shows Perry pointing to a painting of the dramatic fall of the Alamo, artifacts in his office and the “Come and Take It” logo on his own boots.

Texans have a “different feeling about independence,” Perry told the group.

“When we came into the nation in 1845, we were a republic, we were a stand-alone nation,” the governor can be heard saying. “And one of the deals was, we can leave anytime we want. So we’re kind of thinking about that again.”



JUST WHAT we need -- another damn Texan as president, this time one who'd turn America into a bigger, meaner manifestation of the feuding Big 12 Conference . . . which has dwindled to 10 schools and counting down toward oblivion.

Tell you what. If Perry were to become president
(in which case we could be absolutely sure divine judgment was upon us), we in the northern Plains states might just secede and hook up with Canada.

Just us and a great big chunk of the formerly United States' nuclear deterrent.

Sunday, July 17, 2011

The mark of. . . .


This is kind of like being the only kid in your school named Phuc, only worser.

As in bang, bang, shoot, shoot, messing-with-Mexican-drug-cartels, holy-crap-I-might-end-up-dead bad.

As in "Just call me Judy. Please?"

Reuters has the sign-o'-the-times story, right here:

A Texas state senator's beloved signature symbol will be reluctantly stripped from her campaign vehicle and rally signs this weekend after police in her border town warned it could draw unwelcome attention from Mexican drug cartels.

Veteran Democratic Sen. Judith Zaffirini is known by her friends, loved ones and constituents simply as "Z."

But authorities told her sister recently that the symbol, which translates in Spanish to "zeta," could cause the truck to be mistaken for vehicles belonging to the deadly "Zeta" cartel, based on the Texas-Mexico border.

Zaffirini told Reuters on Saturday she was grateful for the warning, but found it "disappointing" and "mind-boggling."

"Sadly, we will remove the 'Z' from our campaign vehicle and will not use it at rallies or other public places," she said.

Late last month, police in downtown Laredo pulled over Zaffirini's sister, Josie Pappas. The officer pointed to three bumper stickers on the pick-up's back window.

The stickers, bearing the word "Zaffirini," were applied in a big "Z" formation on the glass of the blue Ford F-150 truck.

Pappas told Reuters the officer asked her if she had noticed "cars full of men passing me by and staring back" at her car recently.

Thursday, December 02, 2010

Well, that's just not his truth


I don't know why Anderson Cooper argues with these "birther" nuts.

Argument is dead. Futile. Useless. So very last century.

This is the postmodern era, and truth is what we say it is. Cooper and CNN have their "facts." The birthers have their truth, and who are we to impose our "truth" on them? That would be rather patriarchal, not to mention a pernicious attempt at intellectual hegemony.

The birthers think President Obama is a radical socialist Muslin Nazi who was bornded in Kenyah. That is their truth, and you can't impinge upon that with your so-called "facts."


THUS, the CNN anchor hit Texas state Rep. Leo Berman with fact after fact that back in the old days should have sunk his rhetorical ship, only to find that today, facts are just so much sound and fury, signifying nothing. And in the insane asylum called Tejas, it wouldn't surprise me if this bill of Berman's passes.

You see, today we don't have facts, we have "facts."

Perhaps
the question here for CNN is
whose facts do they choose to believe -- the liberal establishment's pinko facts or the facts God-fearing, real-American patriots found on the Internet? The commie liberals have their facts, and the Americans have their facts.

What we have here is a matter of truth vs. truth, and who is anybody to violate another's mind space with their hostile truths?

This is postmodern America, dammit, and we have a way of settling these kinds of disputes. We're going to exercise some raw power here, and whoever doesn't get exterminated gets to believe whatever the hell they want.

It's called "tolerance," and it's the American Way.

And that's the one thing every American can agree on nowadays.

Monday, November 29, 2010

Avoid the clap. Just look at the Big 12.


Texas is like the clap. It's something you want to avoid.

Look at what happened when a perfectly fine athletic conference got all liquored up back in 1994 and hopped in the sack with a bunch of floozies from thereabouts. Not only was it not better in Texas, but the Big 8 ended up with a wicked case of SWC-philis.

And not only that, a TV network had the videotapes, and a shotgun marriage was in Big 8's future. The new union ended up being called the Big 12 -- as in,
"Come to think of it, not even a big 12-pack of beer could make this bunch look prettier at closing time."

Unfortunately, a shotgun marriage -- while it might have kept the videotapes in ABC's vault (and the Big 8 from becoming a celebrity like Paris Hilton) -- did nothing to cure that now-raging case of SWC-philis. Big 12 grew sickly as the years passed and, as the SWC-philis moved into its brain, became prone to irrational rages and sank into a quagmire of co-dependency.


"I hate this SWC-philis. How could I go on without my SWC-philis? Pass me another big 12-pack of Lone Star. (Urp.) Still uglier than s***. Kill me now, I married a f***ing cow. No, really."

ALAS, this is an ill-fated union that won't end until the fat Longhorn sings "Vaya con dios, mi sucker."

Until then, all there is left to do is endure the irrational ranting of The SWC-philitic Formerly Known as Big 8 as its appendages fall off one by one. For example, this insane rant, penned under the pseudonym of "Berry Trammel"
(God, the poor bastard can't even spell names right anymore):
Such is the fractured relationship of Nebraska and its soon-to-be ex-league, you couldn't blame Big 12 commissioner Dan Beebe for telling the Cornhuskers, don't leave, just leave mad.

Corn Country is outraged that Beebe — nor anyone from the Big 12 office — showed up in Lincoln for the Nebraska-Colorado game Friday.

Beebe was honest about why he didn't go to Nebraska. He feared for his safety.

I talked to Beebe in the Boone Pickens press box Saturday night, and he said he had received enough threats from Nebraska fans — over the 2009 title game controversy, over his suspension of NU's Eric Martin for a helmet-to-helmet hit against Oklahoma State, over the officiating in the Nebraska-Texas A&M game two weeks ago — that he was advised to steer clear of Lincoln.

Now the Huskers consider it an affront that no one bothered to conduct a trophy presentation for the Big 12's North division title.
SIGH. They say that when the mind is being eaten up by the SWC-philis, gullibility is always the last thing to go.

Poor, poor bastard. God knows that's what got him into trouble in the first place. Read on . . . if your breaking heart can bear it:
I don't think Nebraska's football standards have fallen so low that the Huskers prize a We-Beat-Mizzou piece of hardware. I just think a once-solid fan base has lost its collective mind.

Nebraskans have resorted to bloodlust over their exodus to the Big Ten. They've demonized the Longhorns. Called the rest of the league rubes for staying aligned with UT.

Hey, Huskers. The Big Ten is a great conference that offers lots of money and lots of intriguing competition. Nobody blames you for going.

We blame you for losing your class.

Last November, one calendar year, I wrote a column with a banner headline: “Why can't every place be like Lincoln?”

I applauded Nebraska's commitment to hospitality and courtesy and a stadium experience the way it ought to be.

What happened to those people? Now Nebraska seems inhabited by a bunch of kooks who frighten off Beebe, an ex-NCAA investigator, and fire off uncouth e-mails like they're from Louisiana or somewhere.
POOR BASTARD. Stockholm syndrome.

Kids, let this be a cautionary tale about what happens when you jump into the sack with just anybody. Loss of virtue is just the beginning of the end result. You, too, could end up with a raging case of SWC-philis. And that's never pretty.

Avoid the clap.

Monday, November 22, 2010

A day in November in 1963


It's a big day in Dallas-Fort Worth this late November day in 1963. The president, vice president and first lady are in town.

WBAP radio is providing complete coverage of the presidential visit. An exciting day in the history of any city, to be sure!

North Texans will long remember this Nov. 22, I'll bet.