Month: January 2008

Meaty Mondays — Where we push past the borders of good taste in the search of something that tastes good.

“You’ve got to have a motto.” That’s what my inner you was telling me. My inner you is kind of like my inner me only it’s you. Be that as it may when one delves into heavyweight matters of thought one must have food for the mind and body. And sometimes that food is barbecue.

Beaumont, Texas, where I live, has a lot of barbecue places. Texas has a lot of barbecue places. The entire southern United States have a lot of barbecue places. And some localities do the damnedest things with their barbecue. Like when I visited Arkansas for the first and only time, for now I hope because Arkansas is a nice state, I found out the hard way that they put cole slaw ON their barbecue sandwiches. What’s up with that? I am not a picky eater but I am when it comes to cole slaw because there are 99,999,000 ways to screw it up.

The good news is Fat Mac’s in Beaumont doesn’t put cole slaw on their sandwiches. The bad news is I think their barbecue is good. What’d I say? Yes it’s good. It’s not excellent. It’s not magnificent. It’s not slap yo’ mamma good. But merely good.

Last Friday I decided to stop by Fat Mac’s which I did and bought a sausage sandwich and had a side of potato salad. The meal with a drink came close to $10. Not a bad value. In the olden days, a couple of years ago, I used to eat at Fat Mac’s because of their hamburgers. They made and I feel they probably still do build a mighty good hamburger. The problem, which to many is not a problem, is that it was heavy with garlic taste. I love garlic but garlic didn’t love me back. However, now that the doc put me full-time on Prilosec, maybe I will give it another try. They give you buns, meat (cheese if you want) and you pick up the fixings.

This restaurant has an inner dining room and an outer that is screened in. The latter is not recommended on a cold day. There are tables and chairs in the half-outdoors dining section while the inside has very long communal tables and benches to sit upon. There is a lot of faux redneck crapola adorning the walls such as reminding you that it’s not a deer camp so you should clean up after yourself. It’s kind of reminiscent of the Rudy’s barbecue chain which is mostly a Texas chain. I don’t know if the restaurants are named after some guy named Rudy or whether it’s a play on the word “rude.” Fat Mac’s people aren’t rude even though the surroundings suggest otherwise.

If you live in Beaumont or are visiting or passing through you might give Fat Mac’s a try. My favorite overall barbecue place is Patillo’s on North 11th Street. Maybe I’ll write about it sometime.

Fat Mac’s Smokehouse
5555 Calder St.
Beaumont, TX
(409)862-8600
$ Reasonable

This afternoon I have been reading about earthquakes for no particular reason that I can think recall. Actually I read something and then read something else and then made it to here on the old EFD blogging room. Am I a nerd or am I just bored?

Earthquake data of many types are available on the National Earthquake Information Center Web page which is produced by the U.S. Geological Survey. What I found interesting was a historical earthquake database on which one may search a certain area using latitude and longitude information. Since we don’t get a whole lot of earthquakes here on the upper Texas Gulf Coast I thought I’d take a look see if any quakes had been recorded. And to my surprise I did find some reports within the 150-mile radius of where I am now typing this — Beaumont, Texas — 47 incidents to be exact ranging from the late 1800s until 1983.

Why the list stops at 1983, I am unsure. The USGS does have more recent reports but the closest earthquake I found within this century was a 2.7 magnitude shaker some 21 miles west of Bryan, Texas, which is 139 miles west northwest of where I am.

I also gained a little knowledge about an interesting project while I was trying to find out where these historical quakes took place. A Web site for the Degree Confluence Project allowed me to find out the general vicinity of where the tremors took place by entering latitude and longitude. What the project entails is people who are trying to visit each place on earth at which the latitude and longitude integer degree intersects. The people who reach that place takes pictures at the very spot and writes a little story about their trip. Hey, it’s something to do!

Using the degree project information I tracked down the area in which 17 of the 47 earthquakes listed within 150 miles of where I live occurred. That would be in the general vicinity of the Kisatche National Forest in western Louisiana. Actually, that parish (the Louisiana version of an American county) is home to the Army’s Fort Polk and is also next door to the Texas county in which I grew up.

I remember hearing about those quakes. This was back in 1964 and I had heard of tremors being felt at the northern end of the county where Toledo Bend Dam was being built. I remember some people talking about the possibility that the shaking came from military exercises taking place at Fort Polk, but later I did find out about a fault in the earth running through that area. Great place for a dam, huh? Probably, at least there is good fishing there, or so I have heard.

According to the USGS information, the quakes in that vicinity ranged from 2.6 to 4.4 in magnitude. All of which means little compared to the constant rumbling in the earth in places such as California or Alaska. But people who are fortunate to not experience quakes tend to take these things for granted, kind of similar to the way people in this area had become fairly complacent about hurricanes before Katrina hit our neighbors in Mississippi and New Orleans, and then Rita came barreling her way thorough our very own streets.

Scientists point to the New Madrid Fault, so named because of nearby New Madrid, Mo., as likely to have “the big one” which I suppose could be felt as far away as where I live. A series of earthquakes happened in 1811-1812 which were among the most powerful ever felt in the United States, an estimated 8-magnitude during each of three of the quakes, says the USGS. Damage occurred as far away as Washington, D.C. and Charleston, S.C., and the quakes caused church bells to ring in Boston some 1,000 miles from the New Madrid area.

The New Madrid quakes even figure into the mystery of how beautiful Caddo Lake, in northeast Texas and northwest Louisiana, was formed. A history of the lake points out that some believe the lake was the result of the quakes while others point to a huge log jam, known as “The Great Raft,” which packed the Red River which flows nearby at Shreveport.

While it is kind of cool to think about the amazing power contained in this force of nature, perhaps we should bear in mind that New Madrid-like quakes will likely happen again. Scientists say a 90 percent chance exists that a quake with a 6-to-7 magnitude will take place within the next 50 years in the Mississippi Valley. The area in which the earthquakes, which are expected at any time, is vastly populated in comparison with the early 1800s. Most buildings were also not built with protection from earthquakes.

Yes, quakes are a mighty awesome force and mighty scary as well.

Stevi Perry is the only model/pageant winner sanctioned by this blog. But don’t hold that against her.

While EFD, this blog, is hardly one of the best-read publications in the Pheresblog (that’s Blogosphere backwards, sort of), it does seem, according to my StatCounter statistics, to be a resource for all those people seeking news about gorgeous Arkansas teen model Stevi Perry.

Stevi, 17, is a working model who has scored some successes in national contests, the latest being named 2008 Miss Arkansas Teen USA. This most recent news is from the place I first heard about Stevi, the Ashley County Ledger in Hamburg, Ark., a small-town publication much like one I ran during my first stop during a two-decade career in newspapers. Had it not been for proud mom, Kelli Perry, who did a search for her daughter’s name on the Web, and after seeing a post here on EFD e-mailed me, I most likely would not have written anything about Stevi. I have since corresponded with Kelli and perhaps EFD might even have an interview with Stevi sometime in the future.

We, being the weird former newspaper reporter who sadly refers to himself in third person, wish Stevi the best of success in both this new year and her career.

Gee, wasn’t Iowa just swell, Mike? Amen to that, Bro. Barack

Ah, Iowa. And just like that Iowa was packed up into crates and shipped off to New Hampshire where it will be used for something more like a real election.

And how about that Brother Obama and the Rev. Huckabee of the First Church of the Stump Speech? My how they shined brightly outside the little snow-covered corn fields of Iowa.

Whether Iowa was significant or relevant as to the future of this campaign can only be discovered in a historical context less one is a seer, or perhaps a seersucker. It’s like what I told a friend earlier in an e-mail concerning a completely different circumstance: “The only thing better than 20/20 hindsight is blowing bubbles out your a**.”

Perhaps even the next primary, or the next, or all the primaries will not foretell who the people really want to lead their respective parties or even if they want to retain the party system at all. Wouldn’t that really be a kick in the pantalones?

A time could come when CW (Conventional Wisdom and not the TV network) could become a relic. Horse sense, once defined in a Mad magazine cartoon I saw as the innate ability that prevents horses from betting on people, tells you that everything doesn’t turn out the same day after day. Like aspirin, no two snowflakes are alike and if you are fooled by twins you might quite possibly be a fool yourself. I know that I am. Polls especially seem vulnerable. One problem is the “cell phone guy.”

By cell phone guy I am not talking about that dorky-looking fellow in the Verizon commercials. I’m not even talking strictly about a guy. Instead, these are the people like several of my friends and even myself who no longer own a landline telephone but rather use a cell. We may not have lived in a certain area code, or even the state in which that area code is based, for years.

Now I am sure there are ways in which pollsters will be able to get around that problem. Maybe they can work around it now. Of course, I have never been called by a pollster on any of the cell phones I have used during the past six years and as far as I know the same can be said for probably most of my friends. On the other hand, I’ve never been solicited by a pollster using any kind of phone in all of my 52 years. So what do I know? Right, nothing or very little.

My background as a journalist tells me that editors and the political junkie political reporters are more interested in viewing the potentiality of a horse race, so to speak. But whether results of one primary election or caucus will tell us anything in the near or the distant future will be something better left up to serious historians, history students and those blowing bubbles out their a**.

The media is all gaga over the Iowa caucuses this evening. At least the media have done a pretty good job lately of explaining just what the hell a caucus is. That takes some doing, especially the Democratic version which is more like a cross between a country square dance and a tribal mating ritual practiced by the lost tribes of the Dog Islands. In reality, Dog Island is a Florida Gulf Coast barrier island and although it may have been inhabited as far back as 8,000 years ago it hasn’t been Metropolis as of late. And I don’t know if any tribes were lost there or even existed.

After (the caucus in) Iowa is over the pack o’ press will be heading for New Hampshire where they get to stand around in the snow and watch those presidential candidates who didn’t drop out — after getting beaten in Iowa like a rented mule — stand around outside factory gates and kiss factory workers or work the quaint little cafes shaking hands with babies. Or maybe I got that backwards. Oh well, who knows and who knows whether it all makes a difference. A lot of people put great stock in these early exercises in democracy, which are coincidentally the only places throughout the only presidential election process in which retail politics are actually practiced on the “neighbor grocery” level.

Of course, inevitably other localities across the nation seem to believe, like the editorial board of the Austin American Statesman, that much ado is made about quite a bit due to actions of a few corn farmers in Iowa. But one has to admit that the Statesman board like hundreds of similar newspaper executives and civic leaders across the country aren’t happy unless their city is the center of the universe. And in a big-picture type of sense they have a valid argument.

One would think a democracy would have more emphasis during the process of electing its leaders on bringing in as many folks as possible to do the “pre-pre-election” before the “pre-election” a.k.a. the party conventions. But nothing is perfect and that is perhaps more prevalent a phenomenon in politics than in any other facet of life with maybe the exception of picking a cellular phone company.

Frankly, I have felt disenfranchised during the last two elections as a voter in Texas. Of course, since I hold no sway over the idiots of the Supreme Court who elected Gee Dubya the first time, it would have made little difference in 2000. I honestly don’t know what the harm would be from a nationwide primary election, or just let matters be a free-for-all until the conventions, much like it was in the olden days. Why, nations with parliamentary forms of government can form a government upon the sneezing of a prime minister. And last but not least, the Electoral College? Give me a break. I would rather a president be picked on the basis of an arm wrestling, tomahawk-throwing or rail-splitting contest than under our system which waits patiently each four years for a royal screw-up every four years.

Oh, and while we are at it, I would like to see the presidential election season drastically shortened from just after the concession speech until the last lawyer figures out they can’t get an injunction to stop the results before going before our “college” of electors. In other words, the presidential election should be a sprint rather than a marathon. I mean, after all, it seems like we have fared just as well with accidental presidents than with those whose campaign took a geological epoch to transpire. (Just a firm opinion, Gee Dubya Bush was no accident. At least, not as a president.)

The reality is that no one of importance ever listens to me so nothing I said above will have any impact on the current state of the presidential electoral process. Knowing some of the bone-headed things I have done over my past half-century, you might decide upon closer examination that, like Martha Stewart so elegantly puts it: ” … is a good thing.”