Daryl and his brothers

Earlier this week we had an ice storm that lasted a couple of days. I lost power the first night but they had it back on within an hour or so. The second night pretty much everybody in this part of Oklahoma lost power, trees and utility poles where falling everywhere (from the weight of the ice), a lose power line was dancing in the street about a block away, things didn't look they would get fixed real fast this time.

The weather forcast was for things to thaw out and the fog to lift about morning time, so I killed time until morning by taking some naps in the van and shopping at Wal-Mart. When the sun came up I hit the road headed South.

During my wait for the roads to start thawing out, I was buying an electric blanket (I had an extra battery and an inverter to run it with) in line behind 3 guys who were dead ringers for the Daryl, Daryl, and Daryl brothers in the Newhart show. Watch caps and all. Right out of the woods.

Two of them were unloading two baskets full of stuff like Gatorade, Ramon noodles, Root Beer, Cinnamon rolls, cases of stuff. They paid for it with one of those electronic food stamp cards, it was $100 of food that had pretty much zero food value.

The third was next and he paid cash for a small Sterno container. I guess it was to cook the Ramon noodles.

Menu

The weather and roads finially cleared up enough for me to drive south a couple hundred miles until they got the power back on.

On the way back home I stopped at some little cafe someplace in the boondocks of Oklahoma for lunch. It was about 20 till 3 in the afternoon. They had a sign out front that said "Open 24 hours".

One thing I learned long ago that whenever you go into a strange restuarent and they ask for a drink order to just get a glass of water until you look at the menu. I hate it when I decide to walk out but have to pay for a glass of tea or something.

Anyway, I asked for water and saw two small menus on the side of the napkin holder. One was a breakfast menu -- breakfast served from 6 am thru 2:30 pm, it said.

Okay.

The other was a lunch menu -- lunch served from 11 am thru 2:30 pm. On the back of that one it had some stuff like corn dogs and pie listed.

I didn't really want a corn dog and it seemed like I was late for breakfast or lunch.

When the waitress brought my water I asked her if she had a current menu. She said, "Do you want a dinner menu?". I said, "I don't know, I just want to eat and it seems I'm too late to eat from these menus".

She walked off and returned with a sheet of paper with the heading Dinner Menu, 5pm thru 9pm NO EXCEPTIONS MADE.

She just dropped it on the table and walked off.

I left, found a Subway a few more miles down the road.

Lynching

The nooses in Jena and more recently in NYC seem to me to be very powerful symbols. I'm surprised at how many people scoff at them or write them off as trivial.

I've never been to a lynching. I've known people who did attend, however. In between my time in the Navy and when I started college I worked for a while on a core-drilling rig for an engineering company in Baton Rouge. A driller I worked with a lot had grown up in Mississippi. In the 30's, when he was a child, he'd attended a couple of lynchings. They weren't secret events in the dead of the night. They were Sunday afternoon after church picnics for the family. Fried chicken and potato salad and big jugs of sweetened ice tea. Just thinking about the normalcy of what it was scares me.

Commies and Nazis and Americans

When I was a kid, going to grade school in the 1950's I have a vivid memory of one of my teachers telling the class the difference between America and those commies. My memory is vivid because, although I was a 5^th generation Texan, my mother had grown up in Nazi Germany and I always perked up when a teacher mentioned the Nazis, in this case she said that the Nazis had been just like the commies.

There were two ways to tell the difference between us and the godless commies -- one was that in communist countries you couldn't travel without being prepared to show identification (been in an airport in the US lately?). The second was that those commies encouraged you to inform on your family and neighbors, even children were encouraged to inform on their parents. Of course such evil could never take root in God-fearing America, she assured us.

TVA

I'm watching a History Channel show about the TVA building dams. I'd always thought the popular wisdom about the TVA was that it's purpose was to bring electricity and the 20th century to the hillbillies.

That might of been the result. But the purpose was to bring cheap electric power to an Alcoa alumninum plant.

Cowboys

I grew up in Texas, as did my Daddy, and my Grand-daddy, and his daddy, and his daddy. I'm not sure about prior to that. I think some of them came from Missouri and some from Alabama. Part of growing up was learning the myth of the Texas cowboy.

I grew up in the city, in Austin, not exactly cowboy country. My daddy grew up in town, in places like Alpine, Texas and Marfa, Texas. He wasn't living the cowboy life, but those places were certainly cowboy country. My granddaddy and grandmother had grown up on ranches in Gaines County, near Seagraves. One of the cowboy stories my grandaddy told me was about the one cattle drive he worked driving cattle from Seagraves to Amarillo right before a railroad spur was built to Seagraves in 1917. He was 11. That experience was enough for him to learn that whatever he ended up doing when he grew up, it wasn't going to be cowboying.

My daddy told me stories about his childhood on the wooden sidewalks of 1930's Alpine that made clear distinctions between ranchers and cowboys. The class differences were very real, in some of those stories the differences were those of life and death.

In the 8th grade we took Texas History. That 8th grade Texas History course very much creates Texas men. They talked about cowboys, yes, but they also talked about Heroes (Jim Bowie) and lawmen (Big Foot Wallace) and outlaws (Sam Bass).

So, I didn't grow up as a cowboy, but I grew up knowing what the cowboy myth was about, knowing it in a deeper sense than just watching John Wayne in the movies and Roy Rogers on TV and listening to Gene Autry records.

I don't live in Texas anymore. I didn't even graduate from high school in Texas. I graduated from Robert E. Lee High School in Baton Rouge, then went to college at LSU and even Northwestern (when my grandmother told me, "there's Yankees living up there, Gary"). I did live back in Texas for a few years as an adult. But, I also lived in places like San Francisco and Seattle. Now I'm in Oklahoma. Rural Oklahoma. But once a 13 year old boy takes that 8th grade Texas History course, he's a Texan forever, no matter where he is.

Ten miles down the road is a town called Perkins, Oklahoma. They have a sign near the city limits that has puzzled me. "Home of the original cowboy". What the hell does that mean? I know about cowboys. And cowboys don't have much to do with Oklahoma, no matter how big a hat Garth Brooks might wear.

The cowboy era ran from just after the civil war to sometime before the end of the 19th century. It lasted 20, maybe 30 years, covering a time when the US was expanding into the West but the railroads weren't covering the continent yet.

Cowboys drove cattle from Texas to Kansas, travelling through Indian Territory, not through Oklahoma. Indian Territory lasted from the mid 1830's until 1890, when it was renamed Oklahoma Territory. The Oklahoma land rush was in 1889 and Oklahoma become a state in 1907. During the cowboy era of American Oklahoma was about Indians, not Cowboys.

What are they talking about? "Home of the original cowboy"?. That sign just made no sense to me at all and I just assumed it was some sort of attempt at revisionist history. Maybe they were talking about the birthplace of the first rodeo clown or something.

Then it finally came to me the other day. They must be talking about a football team mascot. That is one thing Texas and Oklahoma have in common. They get confused real easy and think high school football has something to do with real life.

Oklahoma State University is right down the road from Perkins, in Stillwater, and their football mascot is The Cowboys. Maybe the Perkins High School Cowboys predates Oklahoma State, or something like that.

It turns out that's not the case at all. The Oklahoma State Cowboys is named after a legendary Oklahoma Lawman (and gunfighter) who lived in Perkins.

These people can't even tell the difference between a cop and a cowboy. There's no hope for Oklahoma.

Buying trucks

How do you get to the point where you've bought two trucks from a dealership you've never had a good experience with?

Some things are just way beyond my ability to understand.

The slumlord

When I was a slumlord in Chicago in the 1970's I didn't own a gun. I should
have.

One night, about midnight, the first floor of a two flat in Humbolt Park called
me to tell me that some kids had broken into the basement and would I please call the police. They weren't going to call the police because they didn't trust the cops to not tell the kids who called (a Puerto Rican neighborhood with a lot of street gang activity).

So I called the cops.

They argued with me, since I was calling from another address, how did I know anything? I explained to them. They said they'd send a car but I would have to be there. I said, Okay, I'll drive over.

It was snowing. I lived at 2900 N on Halsted. It was only about 5 Miles to Humbolt Park. But it was snowing.

I drove over. It took me a while becuase the snow was fresh and the street was slick (it was the first snow of the year). No cops waiting when I got there.

I didn't want to check out the basement by myself. I had no flashlight. No gun. I was tired. It was snowing. I was not happy. I sat on the front porch to wait for the cops.

Three kids, who apparantly had gotten bored with trashing my basement, came walking around the front of the house. They walked right in front of my (the basement had a door on the side of the house).

By the time the third one was in front of me I was really disgusted. I grabbed him by the collar of his jacket and headbutted him up against the porch. The other two ran off.

We got into it, knocked a chain link fence down in the process (that belonged to a neighbor). Nobody got hurt. Both of us had heavy jackets on and were moving in a kind of cumbersome way, it was mostly more like a comedy routine. He did pull a knife and cut my jacket, but I knocked it out of his hand and it got buried in the snow.

I didn't chase him, I just sat back down on the porch. I didn't want to go down
and secure the basement door until I was sure everybody was gone.

I waited. Waited. Did I tell you it was snowing?

A cop pulled up. He sat in his car. He didn't get out. It was snowing. He might get wet if he got out of his patrol car. He waved to me to come out to the car.

It was still snowing. I walked to his car. He rolled his window down, and asked me if I was the building owner and what was going on.

I told him that the kids who'd broken into the basement appeared to have left but I needed him to go to the basement and check it out just to make sure.

"It's snowing", he said.

"Yes, I'm aware of that", I said. I stared at him. He didn't budge.

He said, "If you think they're gone I dont really need to check it out".

"Look, I said, I know three of them left. I don't know how many there are to start with. One of the three did this (I showed him the cut on my coat) when I tried to detain him. I need the lock the place up. I don't have a gun. You do. Get off your fat, lazy ass with your gun and your flashlight and make sure the basement is empty or I'll take your fucking gun away from you and do it myself".

I have no idea why I was not arrested.

I think he realized that I was an irate citizen who was giving serious, rational
thought to just killing him for the fun of it.

He got out of his car. Went to the basement. Said it was empty. "Thank you, officer". He left. I had some stuff in the bed of my pickup that I was able to use to board up the door. (I did most of my own maintenece work on my buildings and kept various stuff in my truck at all times). It never stopped snowing.

I went home. It was after 3 am by the time I got home. I couldn't find a parking place. So I parked in the bus stop in front of my condo. I had to go to work the next morning. I got a $20 parking ticket for parking in the bus stop.

Cops. To serve and protect. Unless it's snowing and you're parked in a bus stop.

Competition

Competition. Winning. That's America. It's what it's all about whether we're talking about Presidential elections or about real horseraces.

The first bet I ever made was at a quarter horse race at the racetrack in Ruidoso New Mexico. My grandmother's family was having a family reunion that weekend and I went to the race track Saturday afternoon with a bunch of relatives. The men always had a golf tournament on reunion Saturdays and at 13 I'd already tried golf and decided I had no interest in it at all. So I always did something with the women (I was pretty much the only male over the age of 12 who didn't play golf, even my daddy played golf this one time a year).

I wanted to bet on the races. My Aunt told me to pick out a horse and give her $2 and she'd place a bet for me. So I went down to the paddock area and took a look at the horses in the next race. I saw one I liked. That's the only handicapping I did (I was the school champ in FFA livestock judging competitions). I gave her the $2 and told her the horse. She went and bought me a ticket.

The horse won.

She had bought me a show ticket, it paid something like $2.40. A win ticket (what I thought she was going to buy me) would have paid something like $12.

That Aunt died about 10 years ago, but that doesn't matter, I still havn't forgiven her.

But I learned two things that afternoon. 1. If you want to place a bet, do it yourself. 2. Winning is fun. Being among the top 3 sucks.

Pretty soon we'll be seeing the start of the 2007 World Series of Poker. A competition to see who gets to be declared this years champion poker player. It's hard to find a list of the second place finishers in the WSOP results list.

We have champion poker players, champion coffee shop clerks, and the championship belt for hot dog eating has just returned to America.

What a country.

DARE and low IQ

I had to go to the VA hospital in Muskogee this morning and on the way backed I stopped for a late lunch in Bristow, OK.

The Taco Mayo had a typed announcement posted on the wall next to the cash register, something like this one from Snopes.com

The police officer that works with the DARE program at an elementary school passed this warning on.... If you're ever driving after dark and see an on-coming car with no headlights turned on, DO NOT flash your lights at them! This is a common gang member "initiation game" that goes like this: the new gang member under initiation drives along with no headlights and the first car to flash their headlights at him is now his "target". He is now required to turn around and chase that car and shoot at or into the car in order to complete his initiation requirements.

It is, of course, an urban legend, possibly dating as far back as 1983.

Cops make stuff up all the time. But DARE cops seem to even lack the imagination for that, they just copy stuff somebody else made up 20 years ago.

Of course Bristow Oklahoma is well; known for it's problems with Bloods street gangs.

Breaking news

It seems that there's a possibility that a professional wrestler has been taking steriods.

Who could have ever suspected that?

Elizabeth Edwards, just another political weasel

I'm on some email lists for mailings from some of the Presidential candidates. I usually don't even read them, just delete them unread. I signed up for them because I don't really mind getting a bunch of crap email on a regular basis.

Last night I got one from the Edward's campaign with the Subject line

Why I called Ann Coulter

and a From line of

"Elizabeth Edwards"

Right off the bat we have something less than complete candidness with attaching the name Elizabeth Edwards with that generic campaign email address.

But I can't help myself. I read it.

She didn't explain anything, she didn't give a reason for the call, she just related what happened and told us who the good guy is and who the bad buy is. Can you guess which is which?

Here's how the email letter starts

Last night I had an important talk with Ann Coulter and I want to tell you what happened.

I'm not inspired by this start. I watched that part of Hardball last night. I might call it a dramatic exchange, but it was not an important talk. There was nothing important about it and I don't think I'd characterize the exchange as a talk. Both were speaking to the audience, neither was talking to the other. Dramatic confrontation is probably the best label.

I guess the next sentence is supposed to pass an an explanation promised in the subject line. But, it's not an explanation.

Where I am from, when someone does something that displeases you, you politely ask them to stop. So when I heard Ann was going to be on "Hardball" last night, I decided to call in and ask her to engage on the issues and stop the personal attacks. I told her these kinds of personal attacks lower our political dialogue at precisely the time when we need to raise it, and set a bad example for our children.

It's not an explanation because it miss-characterizes both Southern Culture and what actually happened.

Where she comes from the idea of "politely ask them to stop" means do so privately. It really means that, the privacy part is a very important part of the polite idea. No confrontation, no public postering. A simple, private and personal request is what people "where she comes from" do when trying to stop unwanted personal attacks. Allowing the offending party an out that saves face is very important in a culture that gave us personal duels.

In Southern Culture a public confrontation is an invitation to fight, no matter what the words actually spoken are.

Elizabeth Edwards knows that full well and she's bullshitting us to pretend otherwise.

You can really just stop reading right there, she's given you all the information you need to figure out what kind crap is going on here. Besides, the rest of the email is just an appeal for money. Just for completeness, here it is.

How did she respond? Sadly, perhaps predictably, with more personal attacks.

John's campaign is about the issues—but pundits like Ann Coulter are trying to shout him down. If they will not stop, it is up to us cut through the noise. Help us fight back—please give what you can today.

www.johnedwards.com/rightwing

There are just over 3 days left to hit our $9 million goal for the end of the quarter. If we make it, we can directly reach voters in Iowa, New Hampshire, and all over the country with our detailed plans on the issues that matter. Please give what you can right now to help raise the dialogue and show that Ann Coulter-style politics will never carry the day.

www.johnedwards.com/rightwing

Why do Ann Coulter and other right-wing pundits keep attacking John? Because John's bold, specific plans hit them where it hurts: solving global warming, ending the war, building a fair economy—John's agenda threatens everything these talking heads and their corporate cronies stand for.

And they know John can win—just last week a new poll showed that John is the only Democratic candidate who beats all the possible Republican challengers—by an average of 13 points. So they are trying to take John down early. Their strategy is to sling mud and manufacture scandals—about houses, haircuts and anything else they can think of—to discredit John and take down our movement for change.

The best way to beat them is also the right way—take our message of substance straight to the voters. And that is exactly what this campaign is all about.

But we need your help to hit our goal. Please give what you can today.

www.johnedwards.com/rightwing

And thank you for all that you do to support this cause.

Sincerely,

- Elizabeth Edwards
Wednesday June 27, 2007

There is nothing sincere about her at all if you can use this letter to make a judgment. I have no respect for Ann Coulter but Ann's right about one thing, both sides of the Ann/Elizabeth confrontation are simply creating political theater to entertain the masses for profit.

You can tell that Ann has no class by looking at the way she dresses. She just doesn't have enough sense of style to know what appropriate dress is. She wore on the Today show. Some "little black cocktail dress". Hardball is a political
commentary show -- it's not Entertainment Tonite. Business dress would be appropriate for that show. But to her it's much more important to appear provocative than to be socially appropriate. I just find that classless.

But Elizabeth is just as bad with her pretense of Southern Culture that's nothing of the sort. They deserve each other.

If Chris Matthews had any class he wouldn't have either one of them on his show.

FBI dress code

I'm watching MSNBC and they're showing some film clips of a search warrant being executed related to the death of the pregnant girlfriend of the cop in Ohio.

Various FBI agents are shown carrying stuff out of the house.

They're wearing t-shirts. They have little FBI logos on one side of the breast area in front and in the back big letter that say FBI Search Team, or something like that. White t-shirts.

In 1968 I was in a car accident in Uvalde, Texas and didn't come to for about 4 days. Within minutes after I woke up there was a Deputy Sheriff and a Texas Ranger in my room who wanted to talk to me about whether I'd been to Mexico recently (in 1968 this was a country of laws and even Texas sheriff deputy's would not search a wrecked car for drugs without probable cause). The deputy was in uniform. The Ranger was in a western-cut business suit. I knew he was a Ranger just by looking at him, from the way he was dressed and the style of that Stetson hat. (Frankly, the idea that a Texas Ranger wanted to talk to me sacred the shit out of me).

You used to be able to pick out FBI agents from the way they dressed and the way they carried themselves. They weren't wearing a t-shirt with some kind of logo on it.

Of course back then either a degree in accounting or law was a requirement for the job. These days they hire people with criminal justice degrees.

Felony Redneck

Feeding Gin to a baby is not exactly good parenting, it certianly qualifies as really stupid.

It might even be criminal. But does everything stupid have to be a felony? Is there some kind of limit on how many people we want to put in prison for stupid behavior?

Shane

The American Film Institute produced it's annual list of top movies, the AFI 100.

Actually, it's not really an annual list of top movies, it's actually an annual television show. This is the lede to their website introduction to the list.

They don't pick the movies because of some kind of metric of greatness, they don't even pretend to. They pick the movies that fit within the theme they've picked for this years TV show. That explains why Spike Lee's Do the Right Thing somehow got better in the last 8 years. It was not one of the top 100 in 1998, but became one of the top 100 this year.

Not only that, they make it a real pain in the ass to actually get the list. You have to give them an email address, which they send a verification email to, then you can logon to their download page and get a pdf file listing the movies. What jerks. These people are really trying to milk this crap for every penny of value they can get. I'm almost ashamed of myself for giving jerks like this any attention at all.

But their kind of empty hype works in todays America and this post will get me some hits and every hit helps with the Google ads. I'm as much a penny grubbing slimeball as they are, I guess.

Although they made the politically correct inclusion of one Spike Lee movie and one Woodie Allen movie, in today's political landscape they are able to leave off Cheech and Chong with impunity. The anti-immigration politics of today demands that the artistic vision of movies that glorify pot smoking Mexicans be ignored.

Ann Althouse gives us a list of the 10 movies on the list that she's never seen. What I find interesting about that list is that one of the movies, Shane, is the first movie I remember ever seeing. It was at a drive in, with my parents in the front seat and myself and my infant sister in the back seat. I was about 4. I don't remember much about the movie, but I know I saw the whole thing because what I do remember of it is the final scene with the little boy (who I identified with) yelling out to Shane to come back as Shane rode off into the sunset. Or maybe I just think I remember it because that scene has been replayed so often on TV in the 55 years since I saw the movie.

I'll have to make a list of the ones I haven't seen and add them to my NetFlix queue. I'll do that later.

Update: My thoughts on leaving Cool Hand Luke out of the top 100.

Branding and cross-selling

American Express used to be a brand that had a classy reputation. For years they survived attacks on their business by Visa and MasterCard by maintaiing a status as a class act.

I got some kind of ad in the mail from American Express Publishing today.

I'm not even sure what they're trying to sell. It appears they're trying to be Publisher's Clearing House. Two pages of hype and color. I don't even want to read it.

Are they just determined to kill any possible value the brand might have?

Peggy Hill's Frito Pie

"It's a traditional Texas recipie that I found on the back of a bag of Fritos",
Peggy Hill

I don't know why. I just think that's a really, really funny line.

Tattoos

I had to make a trip to the Post Office to get my mail delivery restored after being out of town a couple of weeks. A woman behind me in line had a very yuppie type of look, running shorts, ponytail, etc. She had a tattoo on each hand. Very un-yuppie-like.

When I was in Las Vegas this last couple of weeks I found a Coffee Bean across the street from the UNLV campus with free wi/fi and spent some time there. I noticed a lot of young college students covered with tattoos. I knew a lot of hippie types in college who didn't shave their legs, but can't recall any with tattoos.

I don't have a tattoo. I was in the Navy, a deck ape in the Navy, and didn't get a tattoo. My daddy had a tattoo -- a small bird on his chest. He was so ashamed of it that he wouldn't cut the grass or go to the beach or go out on the lake without wearing a t-shirt to cover it from public view.

Things sure change.