It looks remarkably like Africa, but it’s not — this is Texas
60 Minutes did a segment on African animals, some on the verge of extinction in their natural habitats, thriving on Texas ranches that offer the opportunity to hunt some of the animals in exchange, I guess, for the economic incentive to protect the rest. Embedding was disabled, but you can watch the video on YouTube.
(via marginal revolution)
tweet of the day, III
The official flower of the state of Texas is Meat
— Fake Wikipedia (@FakeWikipedia) January 18, 2012
for the Texans, specifically
Dallas teen missing since 2010 was mistakenly deported:
There are still many unanswered questions about how an African-American girl who speaks no Spanish is mistaken for a foreign national.
Mistletoe Shortage
There’s a mistletoe shortage in Texas, due to drought. But some people don’t care.
“In 1901 you needed to be under the mistletoe to steal a kiss in public,” said Mr. George. “In 2011, you can do just about anything you want in public and it goes unnoticed.” When asked about the shortage, Mr. George was confident there would be no love lost.
dear clusterflock
In what contexts, if any, are sanctity or the idea or possibility of sanctity valuable?
The legacy of Mr. Peppermint
In memory of Mr. Peppermint, friend of clusterflock, Teresa R., sends two Peppermint-related links.
One: How Mr. Peppermint’s son became the lead singer of the Butthole Surfers.
Being the son of Mr. Peppermint has always figured into Gibby Haynes’ myth, as has a past that includes being an “A” student and basketball star at Lake Highlands High School and an accounting/economics major at Trinity University in San Antonio. Almost from the get-go, Gibby has been asked about his old man in interviews–”He’s, like, the coolest guy in Dallas,” he says on this particular occasion–and, in turn, Jerry has become something of a cult figure among Butthole fans who still find the images of father and son so much at odds. Gibby was headed for the straight life till he and guitarist Paul Leary steered the van down the crooked path in 1981, formed a partnership that would eventually lead to the Butthole Surfers, and played a San Antonio art-gallery gig where surely they were embraced as the avant-garde: Nail Gibby to the wall and call it “art.” But how Gibby got from one place to another is a story seldom explored and rarely told.
Two: How Mr. Peppermint encouraged Erykah Badu to sing.
First time I met Erykah Badu was in February ’96, at the old Grinders on Lowest Greenville, where she’d poured coffee just a few months earlier. It was a full year before her debut Baduizm was released; those Grammys were still in the distant horizon. It was her first interview, her first chance to tell her life’s story — the transition from Booker T. to Brooklyn, from a would-be with a demo to a singer with a recording contract. And one of the first things she said that afternoon was: She became a singer in large part because of a man best known as Mr. Peppermint.
Which, finally, reminds me of the Erykah Baduh tweet I made yesterday.
from the comments
Last night my long-time friend Allen shared his recollections of a Dallas children’s TV figure known as Uncle Tiny, whom he dubbed Uncle Tiny the Obscure, as none of the rest of our gang remembered the man. Allen recalled having seen Uncle Tiny in person at Kiest Park in Oak Cliff, where Uncle had “a small trick pitcher from which he poured a seemingly endless supply of 7-UP.” Allen was impressed. “Uncle Tiny was cool.”
Greek Tragedy Played Out High School Football Style
This week I was reminded of this game from the Texas high school football playoffs in 1994. We join the action with about 3 minutes remaining in the game.
Somebody made this
He could have set the Guinness World Record for people who wanted to kill him
The story of Edgar Valdez, aka La Barbie, an American citizen who rose to the top of one of Mexico’s prominent drug cartels.
Like many Texans, Barbie grew up right across the border from Mexico, in the city of Laredo. The place feels like something from a Mexican postcard, with cobblestone plazas and picturesque waterfalls – except for the massive, multilane bridge to Mexico that cuts straight through town. Until the drug war, everyone in Laredo saw the two sides of the border as one; many families, after all, had blood ties in both Mexico and the States. As a kid, Barbie loved to visit Nuevo Laredo, a border town bustling with donkeys, food carts, girls in little embroidered dresses, shoeshine boys and the smell of roasting corn. It was like stepping into another world, and all you had to do was cross the bridge.
In high school, Barbie was in the popular crowd, horsing around in the breezeways outside of class and waging egg wars after school. On weekends, he went to keggers on ranches, played elaborate scavenger games and hung out with his steady sweetheart, Virginia Perez, a bubbly, blue-eyed blonde. He grew up in a middle-class development on the outskirts of Laredo, a kind of no man’s land where Burger Kings didn’t begin to sprout up until the Nineties. Even the people of Laredo considered it “Indian territory,” an area rife with dope and illegal immigrants. Barbie’s parents raised him and his five siblings in a tidy, orange-trimmed home with palm trees in the front. “They’re regular Ozzie and Harriets,” says Jose Baeza, a spokesman for the Laredo police department. “They’re business owners, PTA, morning-jog people.”
Here’s a link to the printer friendly version.
(via the browser)
while Texas burns
Gov. Perry avers that we can handle ourselves down here, and I believe it. That’s why he’s slashed the Forest Service (an agency swollen with vampires, and vegans) budget and cut fire department funding by 75 percent, leaving us with a hose and a prayer. The hose isn’t doing much, but I can tell that prayer is helping. In fact, I know it’s helping.
As Perry is keen to remind us, Texas has the power to secede from this sinful Union if we feel like it, leaving the rest of the country to wander around with no infrastructure, eating each other like in The fucking Road, stymied, burned to bubbles and unable to follow-through on its own metaphors, sort of like Texas right now, actually. Well this is how we want it, I think!
“No Penetration”
tweet of the day
quote out of context
His father-in-law actually did his vasectomy.
photo out of context
A Talk with Blaine Dunlap
In March [Unfair Park] screened one of the greatest films made in or about Dallas, director Blaine Dunlap’s 1973 Sometimes I Run, about Stanley Maupin, who worked for the city’s Public Works Department flushing downtown’s streets in the wee small hours of the morning. Some Friends of Unfair Park said they’d seen it before, in high school long ago or in a sociology class at SMU. For most, though, the blue-tinted black-and-white short was brand new, a riveting revelation — 21 minutes’ worth of downbeat cinéma vérité, Pennebaker rolling with the Public Works Department as his leading man played country Kerouac.
And a couple of weeks ago, Unfair Park’s Robert Wilonsky published this feature on my dear long-time friend Blaine: Sometimes I Direct: A Talk With Blaine Dunlap, Who Once Captured Dallas Better Than Anyone.
headline of the day
Drunk father lets 8-year-old son drive pickup
from the comments
Today is my birthday and we are in Marfa! As it has every birthday of my life, it rained this morning. No matter where I am, it rains. Marfa is parched (recovering from 10 rainless months), so it is lovely to see everything getting a drink. I will refrain from taking the credit, but of course, we all know better. To quote Bill Murray in Groundhog Day, “I make the weather!”
Texas introduction
Fuck’s your name, anyway?
Mark Menjivar, You Are What You Eat
Delicatessen Attendant | Daphne, AL | 4-Person Household | Disowned by parents for marrying a black man.
You Are What You Eat is a series of portraits made by examining the interiors of refrigerators in homes across the United States.
I like that so many of them are from Texas.
(via marginal revolution)
Texas Theatre Oswald T-Shirts
A little local controversy.
Jason Reimer of Aviation Cinemas, who operates the Texas Theatre and created the T-shirt, says it is about accepting history. For better or worse, Oswald’s arrest at the theater (which Reimer prefers to call “the incident”) has defined the theater’s identity. “Dallas has not come to terms with a lot of its history,” he said. “Oswald is a part of the theater’s history. Everyone knows it. We are acknowledging it.”
Hidden Treasure: Lost Photos From the Set of American Graffiti
In March, the Magnum photo agency stumbled onto a remarkable find: Nearly two dozen lost photos from the set of American Graffiti.
my current desktop
For Cindy.
I get the news I need from the weather report
Cafe And Mercury Colony Park. U. S. Highway 90, Dryden, TX 78851
