Blogs

These days with casual work environments and churches filled with jean clad worshipers you might get the impression that there are no rules when it comes to our personal dress. This of course would be a mistake and in the case of this particular Texas fan, a very painful mistake indeed.

a bloody skirmish that left a Texas-shirt-wearing fan nearly castrated and an Oklahoma fan facing aggravated assault charges that could put him in prison for up to five years.

This does bring to mind the old saying... "The only two things from Texas are steers and queers, and I don’t see any horns on you"

There are few good things about a weekly 10 hour round trip commute between my home and my apartment. But, one thing that that it has given me is time, time to listen. From Books such as Guns, Germs and Steel to radio programs such as 'Piano Jazz' and most interestingly 'The Jefferson Hour'. TJH is best described by it's homepage...

The goal of each of The Thomas Jefferson Hour® programs is to tease out the truth of each topic in the tradition of Thomas Jefferson - the founding father educated in Enlightenment ideals and considered by many to be the visionary of the founding of our nation.

Humanities scholar and author, Clay S. Jenkinson, adopts the persona of Jefferson each week to comment on current events and answer questions you may have about Jefferson's thoughts on any and all topics. Clay has portrayed Thomas Jefferson for more than two decades. He is the recipient of the National Endowment for the Humanities highest award, then called the Charles Frankel Award, for his humanities-based first person interpretation methodology.

I highly suggest swinging by The Jefferson Hour website and taking a listen to a few of the programs. Let me know what you think.

I'm no fan of chickens. They stink, they're stupid and while the butchering of any animal can't be called fun, chicken butchery is on a level with inner city free clinic work. However, until I figure out how to get my rabbits to lay eggs I'll have chickens. That being the case I was determined to have the best small holder chickens I could find, no battery born monstrosities for me. I was only interested in meat quality and mothering ability.

I want to premise this little article with “THIS IS NOT FOR THE SQUEMISH!”

There are a lot of reasons for this statement. Our friends in the SUN wrote a story from Berlin about yet another exotic pet owner being devoured by his beloved pets.

When your forced outside in the winter just to torch your hausersticks! ...  But hope is on  the way. The free (or relatively) market comes through again to support the down trodden and opressed. 

I give you...

http://www.suck.uk.com/

Would be a Charlie Rose.

OK, so it's hardly funny or blasphemous, painful or even a waste of time, nothing my normal posts are known for being (OK, I hedged a bit with the 'funny' tag) but hopefully this one is at least informative.

One of my Geekly pleasures is watching Charlie Rose. There are so few good interviews done on TV or even the print media these days and Charlie has such an intelligent straight forward conversational format to his show I can't help but watch, even when he is interviewing someone I didn't know existed before the opening credits. You (or should I say I) actually learn something about the person and thier career instead of just watching a 10 minute commercial on thier latest movie, book or CD.

So, if you are like me and enjoy the work that Charlie does you'll love his new site. It has over 4000 hours of interviews from Rupert Murdoch to David Bowie and everything in between. Check it out (make sure you have some time set aside)

www.charlierose.com

I was asked to take survey in London while waiting in Gatwick.  Sure, why not?  It's not like I didn't have time...

(Where British Airways puts its coach passengers)

 Now, the survey is offically taken up by BAA, which I suspect has something to do with sheep, or airports, or sheep in airports, which is definitely what one feels like trying to navigate the incredibly-badly-laid-out airport.  Changing flights at Gatwick isn't as bad as, say, changing flights at Heathrow (an experience in queuing so bad that even the English can't stand it), but it's very clear that BA has the main hub, and everybody else gets to spend a half-hour walking down randomly-twisting corridors.

While having been born a Texan and being a Texan of seven generations, in the course of my life I have developed a fine appreciation for the wildness of western Arkansas. There are several reasons for this, I suppose. Coming from the Llano Estacado, first and foremost, I have come to appreciate trees. Even the mere existence of vast tracks of trees is amazing to me.

Another thing I enjoy is water. Not the kinds of floods like we have been having in north Texas of late. That is a 20 year phenomena. I am talking about continuing, regular types of rainfall. There are not as many tornadoes in Arkansas, and year ‘round there are storms that keep all those beautiful trees alive. There are even creeks and rivers there that have water in them for 12 months of the year. Simply beautiful to behold; and it makes for a fantastic playground if you are an outdoor type like me.

Texas has seen a five year drought come to an end. Has it come to and end? We shall see, but now we have registered as the second wettest June on record, since records have been kept. In my book, weeks of torrential rains during a time when we are normally praying for a single cloud to appear is a hint. Last year at this time there were cracks in the ground that I could stick my arm into. If you put your ear next to them, you could hear people speaking Chinese. Year after year there was pretty much no rain at all, until we all got sick of praying for rain.

All of those prayers paid off this year, evidently. Now we are facing water, and a lot of it. There are things that happen when a drought ends that one does not normally expect. I have cracks in my walls again, for example, that we paid a lot of money to fix at the height of the dry season. Now that there is water, my foundation has decided to move around again. Thank God we bought a guarantee for that sort of thing. Now that there is water, the rivers and lakes are full to over-flow. Now that there is water, there is no amount of mowing that will control the grass or weeds in my yard. Now that there is water, we have web-worms.

Worms, you say? What kind of problems can worms bring?