Month: April 2007

It is a rather long story of how I came to watch the Neches River Festival Parade today in downtown Beaumont, Texas. The festival celebrates the Neches (NAY-chez)River, which flows down the city’s eastern side on its way to join the Sabine River at Sabine Lake, which is more bay than lake just north of the Gulf of Mexico. The river acts as a waterway for the big ships that dock in the Port of Beaumont. Those ships carry everything from petrochemical products to Bradley Fighting Vehicles and M1-A2 tanks heading from Fort Hood to Iraq.

Mayoral candidate Becky Ames and her little dog too.

As you can see, Becky Ames is a council member at-large. I don’t think she is very large, however. As a matter of fact, I think she’s just right. Nonetheless, she is running for mayor of Beaumont and I don’t know why she can’t advertise the fact while riding in the parade. Perhaps it is common courtesy, maybe it has to do with our election laws. She has been on the council for awhile and I have no idea how well she would do as mayor. I just haven’t followed city politics all that closely. I do know that the King of the Neches River Festival is the outgoing mayor Guy Goodson. Perhaps Councilwoman Ames could be named King of the Neches River Festival (or Queen) if she is elected and term-limited as mayor. Beats me.

Nothing brightens up a parade like a pretty, young girl.

This pretty, young and pretty young girl was riding on a float with other pretty, young girls. By float, I mean a flatbed trailer of the sort that heavy machinery such as Caterpillar tractors are carried upon. Actually, there were quite a few pretty, young girls on this trailer and I cropped all but this one out. The reason was that she had a pretty smile and secondly because my photo skills suck. I will leave it at that.

Why did people keep throwing these things at me?

Usually, I don’t collect Mardi Gras beads. But since it wasn’t Mardi Gras and since kids on these huge floats kept throwing them at me, I decided to pick them up. Yes, it is a crappy picture. No, I don’t really give a damn.

Just when you thought the aftermath of the Virginia Tech shootings might settle down to allow those affected a chance to heal emotionally, along comes those nutso anti-gay fanatics from Westboro Baptist Church in Topeka, Kan. You know, those folks with the catchy Web site, godhatesfags.com?

Those fine Kansas Christians plan to picket the funeral of Virginia Tech shooting victim Ryan Clark which is to be held tomorrow in Evans, Ga.

The Westboro gang are the ones who picket funerals of U.S. soldiers killed in Iraq, the fanatics’ reason being that God (apparently the angry one)is punishing our country for its “sodomite” ways.

Now, especially in the wake of what happened in Virginia, I don’t advocate violence. But sometimes actions such as those of these nuts from Westboro make me think they need to be slapped silly. Who knows, perhaps their angry God will turn on them.

A report a short while ago on NPR told about how the young students were despairing of all the media who have descended upon the area of Virginia Tech in the wake of the massacre there.

No doubt, you will find your basic Type A, overdriven, lack-of-common-sense reporter who would crawl under and over the dead to get a comment. But most are not like that and are doing a job, as some who spoke to NPR agreed.

What some of these youngsters don’t get it that no one is forcing anyone else at gunpoint to speak to the media. Some seek out reporters because they want to tell the story of a friend or share their sentiment of something which has been truly awful.

One child, perhaps a high school student, complained to the NPR correspondent that the media were lurking around on My Space and Facebook to find potential respondents, or victims, depending on your point of view. Excuse me, but are these kids aware that when they put something online — with exceptions of course — that their stupid pictures and random thoughts and kittens and butterflies and unicorns all go out around the world? Ever hear of something called the WORLD WIDE WEB???

Oh my. That is about all I can bring myself to say. I think I might go to the beach for the weekend.

The blame game has started over the shootings at Virginia Tech after what appears to be the nations deadliest shooting incident. The news reports now at almost 8 p.m. CDT — about 12 hours after the first shots were fired — say at least 33 people were dead but it remains unclear if one or more shooters were involved.

It would be prudent for people to not start pointing fingers until the basic details have been sorted out. Of course, maybe the blame coming like lightning from cable TV and the Internet is a normal reaction if one subscribes the Elizabeth Kubler Ross model of grief. Kubler Ross said that the stages, which include anger, does not necessarily appear in order.

We will eventually see how this story plays out and who gets the biggest heap o’ blame beside the killer or killers. I suppose you just can’t fight grief.

The flight to Houston from Baltimore-Washington this afternoon seemed like it was kind of dragging on a bit. I couldn’t really tell because I don’t use a watch except for my cell phone and it was turned off.

Clouds had kind of obscured the view on and off. I did fly over what I believed to be Talledega Motor Speedway, the venue my friend Ross and I visited a couple of years ago for a NASCAR race.

Looking at the Continental route map inside its in-flight magazine, I figured we would be flying over northern Mississippi shortly, making our way back to Texas.

After awhile, sitting in a port window seat, I looked out and saw what I thought to be a rather large lake. I kept looking at it, saying to myself: “Jeez, that’s a hell of a big lake.” Soon I saw a couple of noticeably-sized islands in the lake while what seemed to be a city of moderate size appeared onshore. Down there too was a pretty good piece of paved airport and it was then I realized that we were flying over my old Navy stomping grounds of Gulfport, Miss.

During my couple of years stationed at Gulfport, I never made it out to the barrier islands sitting between the Gulf of Mexico and the Mississippi Gulf Coast. I understand that they took a pretty big hit with Hurricane Katrina. But they looked beautiful from the air. Unfortunately, I didn’t take the photo above, as it is a U.S. Geologic Survey photo.

It kind of shocked me, I don’t know why, to see the U.S. 90 bridge at Bay St. Louis from the air and to realize that it was still washed out from the storm. I looked at the Mississippi Department of Transportation Web site — which is really quite good — and it reminded me that both that bridge and the Biloxi Bay bridge remain out of commission.

Soon I saw out my window what I figured to be the Rigolets, the waterway/swamp connecting Lake Borgne and Lake Pontchartrain. Driving back from Gulfport once from New Orleans I took Hwy. 90 and drove through the Rigolets, a kind of wild swamp ride. We also flew just north of New Orleans and over Lake Pontchartrain. After seeing it from 30,000 feet, the times I drove over it on its bridges didn’t do the lake’s size any justice.

By the time we flew over the Atchafalaya Basin I was kind of wondering where the hell we were going. I don’t know, perhaps flights from Washington, D.C., to Houston take that route but I thought it was kind of odd and it certainly wasn’t the same way we flew up to BWI.

At some point in time we flew out over the Gulf, which really is pretty cool to see from the air. There certainly seemed to be a lot more oil drilling platforms just off the coast than I had ever imagined.

By the time we made our descent to Houston we were in thick clouds. The plane literally came out of the clouds when it was about to put its wheels down.

Not a regular flier, I still somehow managed some frequent flier perks from past flights and thought it wasn’t too shabby to be one of the first to board the plane after first class passengers. The downside was that the flight was full to the gills and I was stuck back in my window seat on Row 21 upon landing. We had pulled up to the main Continental terminals at George the 41st airport and knew I would have to take a shuttle over to the puddle-jumper planes, one of which just might still be there to take me to Beaumont.

But the flight from BWI had indeed took about 30 minutes longer than scheduled. I asked the captain going out of the 737 if we had flown around storms. He said: “Something like that.” Since I had only 10 minutes to get to my flight, I didn’t stick around to quiz him.

Remarkably, I got to the A terminal about five minutes from our scheduled departure. But, no one had even left the terminal yet for the plane. The weather had caused delays. Eventually, we got on a shuttle bus to drive out to the little twin-engine Saab turboprop. Then there was a line of all sorts of airplanes, most bigger than ours, waiting to take off.

The weather report for the 25-minute ride back to Beaumont didn’t sound very promising with overcast skies and gusts up to 30 mph. And, it was a bit rough. But we arrived, again surprisingly, on time.

My only real problem on this Friday the 13th was that one of my checked bags didn’t come back with me. Hopefully it will catch up with me soon. So I guess this didn’t qualify as a real Friday the 13th. Of course, I still have a few hours to go on this day.

An afterthought — I know it isn’t good to edit after I have published something. I have done this a few times now on this particular piece. But the truth is, it is difficult for me to edit something online whether it be using blogger or writing something with Word. Perhaps I am just one of those dinosaurs who is used to seeing things on paper. My half apologies.