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There are good eats at the end. Trust me. You’ll gain a few pounds.

It’s the weekend. Time to cut a rug. Or cut a tree. Or cut a big ol’ piece of pe-can pie. That reminds me. A week or two ago I had an appointment with my neurologist at the VA hospital in Houston. I stayed the day before at a hotel near the Texas Medical Center, where my hospital is located.

During that trip I managed to meet up for lunch with my good friends from Missouri City. That is a suburb of Houston, I suppose you’d call it. It is right next door to Southwest Houston, in Fort Bend County.

It’s been quite awhile since I’ve seen my friends Tere and Marcy. We all went to college around the same time though not exactly together. Maybe my friend Tere will let me write about how we know each other someday. If she does, maybe I will let me write about it. It’s been a year or more since we’ve all seen each other though. And I really like their company. They are some enjoyable ladies whom I am proud to call friends.

With that said, we met up for lunch that day before my appointment. We had not exactly decided where we were going to eat. Actually, we had not decided at all as it turned out. It was more like let’s go to this place and we ended up going to a place next to that place. Ultimately we chose a Pappas Bar-B-Q near Reliant Stadium, also near where I was staying.

As we were going inside, or perhaps as we were choosing to eat at Pappas, I told my friends I had eaten there long ago. As it turns out, I was wrong. I may have eaten at Pappas somewhere. Hell, they’re all over Houston, not to mention the Pappas Bros. Steakhouse, Pappadeaux Seafood, Pappas Burger and more, under the umbrella Pappas Restaurants all originating from a Greek family. Some of the family ended up in Houston selling beer coolers. Now the company is comprised of 8 different restaurants in 80 different locations in the Southwest, South and Midwest.

I didn’t know all that when I thought I had been there before and wrongly told my friends. I have been to Pappadeaux, located just down the highway from me here in Beaumont. No, I was thinking about another family which run the Goode Company.

The Goode Company Barbeque on Kirby Drive in Houston was the place I was thinking about. I rode there in a limo one night with some friends, one of whom was to be married the next day. I think our party lasted longer than the wedding did. Nonetheless, we pulled up outside and had some barbecue that night back in the last century. The barbecue was good. It was all good.

I have since been to the same good Goode barbecue place as well as the nearby Armadillo Palace, another of the Goode label. A very spiffy little bar and grill it is. In 2011 I would be made to move my pickup within the establishment’s parking lot so a limo could pull up. Inside the limo was some member of the Baltimore Ravens, who had beaten the Texans that next day. I should have just waited until I was finished with my meal. Or, until security came.

Before I get too way off track, as Tere, Marcy and I were checking out of Pappas we happened to notice these almost-larger-than-life desserts for sale. One was a cheesecake. The other a Pe-can pie. I bet five people could have eaten that pie. About one-fifth of that thing looked scrumptious. My blood sugar levels spiked just looking at them. We did not eat the dessert. We probably put on three pounds just looking at it. Just so you know, a whole pe-can pie is $13.95. You could probably feed a whole North African village with one.

I wrote all of this, just for the ending. Happy weekend.

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We know “the British are coming,” so don’t sweat what we don’t know.

A Facebook friend whom I’ve never met but would like to one day sent me one of these You Tube clips that gets zapped around the Internet to sow seeds of discontent.

This particular one showed rail flat car upon flat car of up-armored, desert-painted military trucks. The fear spread by this clip was that these were military personnel carriers FEMA was sending out for a war to disarm Americans. Or something equally as silly. My friend wasn’t making those claims. She was just merely looking for the truth which often gets lost this day and age of Internet conspiracies.

I explained to her how FEMA doesn’t have a black budget to purchase secret weapons plus conspiracy after conspiracy spread around on the emergency agency has repeatedly proven untrue. FEMA may not have done a jam-up job in the wake of the early 21st century hurricanes of the Mississippi, Louisiana and Texas coasts, or perhaps even since. But no one has ever cast one iota of evidence that the agency is building concentration camps for housing the “right-thinking.”

My friend, after my explanation, thanked me for putting her mind a little more at ease.

Why should people fear or embrace or even believe the first thing they see come across in their e-mail or Facebook or Twitter? There is real stuff to get scared about.

The U.S. is moving anti-missile weapons to Guam in case the idiot leader of North Korea decides to launch something. Not that we should particularly be worried about the power of the Peoples Republic forces. We should be concerned about the stupid logic and likely bad counsel received by the young dictator of North Korea. The worry should be that Kim does something stupid ridiculously dangerous. Let’s say he launches a missile towards an island and it hits near Seoul, perhaps even near the thousands of American troops. Even something more benign could result in the flattening of what was North Korea. We should worry for all those innocent folks in North Korea as well as our troops and the Korea they protect across the 38th Parallel.

We should be concerned for the vigilant folks who keep the peace in the homeland. Some folks have decided it is open season on officers of the law. An assistant district prosecutor in Texas, a Colorado prison warden, the assistant DA’s boss who was the district attorney in Kaufman County, Texas, along with his wife, and today a sheriff in West Virginia have all been killed within the last two months. Is there a string there? Maybe. Maybe not. The carnage shouldn’t particularly keep the normal citizen up at night. But all those folks affected by this savagery and those who are paid to prevent it all could use some good thoughts, even prayers if you are so inclined.

Plenty of worry finds us everywhere, it seems, in this Internet age. And it is a time we are more informed than ever that “The British are coming.” Sorry, my Brit friends, just a metaphor or perhaps simile. I won’t say: “Don’t worry. Be happy.” But perhaps, “Don’t sweat that which just as easily could be bullshit. Be happy as you have a right to such happiness.”

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Texas AG: My name is “Sue.” How do you do?

Fate would seem to guarantee that had Gregory Wayne Abbott been born a girl his parents would have named him Sue. Or so one would think.

As of September 2012 the Texas Attorney General “Greg” Abbott had run through more than $2.5 million of the taxpayers money from having filed 24 lawsuits against the United States. It also appears that Abbott hasn’t run out of things over which to sue the federal government.

An article today in the right-wing Washington Times says Abbott is once again threatening to sue Uncle Sam. This time Abbott plans to waste more scarce tax dollars in litigation should President Obama sign a United Nations Arms Trade Treaty.

Earlier today the UN General Assembly approved the treaty over 23 abstentions and “no” votes coming from North Korea, Iran and Syria. What great company Abbott is in with his animus toward the treaty!

The UN News Center, the official news site for the organization explains what the treaty will and will not do:

 “The treaty regulates all conventional arms within the following categories: battle tanks, armoured combat vehicles, large-calibre artillery systems, combat aircraft, attack helicopters, warships, missiles and missile launchers, and small arms and light weapons.

 “According to the UN Office for Disarmament Affairs, the treaty will not do any of the following: interfere with domestic arms commerce or the right to bear arms in Member States; ban the export of any type of weapon; harm States’ legitimate right to self-defence; or undermine national arms regulation standards already in place.”

Those darned Europeans and their “misspelled: words such as “armoured,” “calibre,” and “defence!” Why it would make a pure-D, red-blooded American want to go buy a big batch of Freedom Fries.

It’s that Second Amendment right of U.S. citizens which has the AG’s boxers in a bunch. Well, I’m not sure he wears boxers and I suppose men’s undies really shouldn’t be a topic here since Abbott is partially paralyzed and wheelchair-bound. That’s not to say Abbott is a great leader in rights for the disabled. He’s not. And even though he is of the Republican religion whose tenets say “thall shall not sue,” Abbott started off his career as a de facto serial plaintiff’s lawyer by suing the owner of the tree that fell on the future Texas AG as he was jogging by.

Abbott said in a letter to the president that the treaty fails to recognize an individual’s right to bear arms and to protect their families. He claims the treaty will be carried out by bureaucrats who are not accountable to U.S. citizens.

“I recognize that the ostensible purpose of the treaty is to combat the illegal international trade of weapons into third-world war zones,” Abbott writes. And writes. “The treaty could, however, draw law-abiding gun owners and gun store operators into a complex web of bureaucratic red tape created by a new department at the UN devoted to overseeing the treaty. For instance, the treaty appears to lay the groundwork for an international gun registry overseen by the bureaucrats at the UN.”

His legal rant to Obama is an example of the “black helicopter” style of paranoia that Abbott taps into for furthering his political career. How can one forget his threat during the 2012 elections to order any international election observer arrested who would dare show up at a Texas polling place?

Was it not that the AG was playing to his Tea Party base the litigant-averse Republicans would burn Mr. Abbott, and presumably his wheelchair, in effigy for the filing of frivolous lawsuits. In fact, a law signed in 2011 by fellow mad dog Republican Gov. Rick Perry seeks payment for court costs in suits in which the loser must pay.  Would that happen with all the frivolous suits filed by Greg Abbott?

Well, it is like that old saying that old sayers say all the time, at least Democratic ones: If hypocrisy was a crime, most of our Texas elected officials would be behind the cross bars!

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My un-April Fool’s Day joke: I give you Kim Jong Un

Here it is 1 April and I haven’t got a fool anywhere. Well, that’s a fool itself because plenty of fools exist around me and sometimes I think I am the biggest fool of all.

Practical jokes, as opposed to impractical jokes, have never really been my forte. Oh I can write funny lines, at times. I can tell funny jokes, although I confess to having a terrible memory for anything but absolutely nasty jokes that you wouldn’t want to tell just anyone.

But the type of joke that raises to the occasion of the great “April Fools!” Uh-uh.

“Hey,” my mother said. “Wake up. You don’t have to go to school today.”

“Huh?”

“April Fool!’ Momma said.

My parents were great April Fool pranksters. Their jokes were not the grand but the ones just close enough to reality to turn into a classic fool-tommery. Something, like tom-foolery. Already.

What kind of April Fool joke would this news be: The revelation that North Korea has Austin, Texas, in its nuclear sites? I mean, Austin can be a rather pretentious city at times, you know, hipper-than-thou? The traffic probably could use an explosion to blow it up and start all over again. Kids, don’t try this at home. Or in Austin.

I don’t need that ol’ “Keep Austin Weird” jive. Believe me, I’ve been to much weirder places than Austin.

Austin is a lovely town with its roller-coaster streets. The old “Pink Dome” of the State Capitol stands out for the world to see driving south on I-35, even with Darrel K. Royal and God-knows-who-else Memorial Stadium almost blocking the seat of state government out. Then there is Barton Springs Pool with its “just-right” temperatures year-round and nekkid bodies here and there.

I mean, that isn’t even a good April Fool joke, what the idiots running the communist North Korea government have suggested. It’s sick.

See what I am talking about. I never could do an April Fool’s prank for all the non-existent food in North Korea.

 

 

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Duct tape: Dandy bandage and more

An old high school friend who I am happy to have reconnected with through Facebook is a cattle farmer in East Texas. Now I am not here to get into a discussion on the difference between a cattle farmer and rancher. Some would say there is a difference, that people who raise cattle are ranchers. Others would say half-a-dozen of two and screw the other 10. Nevertheless, Bobby raises longhorn cattle and does so on his cattle farm.

My friend wrote that a limb snapped while he was clearing a fence row, causing some barbed wire to puncture a vein in his arm. His first aid consisted of wrapping it in a bandanna and using duct tape for a bandage. I wrote Bobby that one time I had a similar mishap. My friend Waldo and I was fencing some 200-something acres of his country land up in Cherokee County, Texas, one summer. The barbed wire snapped from the spool and poked me with one of its barbs right into my right-armed median vein. I think that’s what the vein is called. It is the one opposite your elbow. The one in might right arm is fairly prominent and has always drawn positive comments from the many nurses and phlebotomists who have poked the vein for assorted reasons over the years.

I had nothing practical that day to stop the bleeding except my shirt. We were out in the middle of the country and I was hot and sweaty. It was no big deal. I’m pretty certain some duct tape was around somewhere in Waldo’s truck. But it never occurred to me to wrap it around my shirt for a bandage. I think I was still licensed as an emergency medical technician back then, though I wasn’t a “practicing” one. Still, why I didn’t think of using duct tape to stop my oozing, red blood is beyond me.

Maybe I was not, back in the day, fully bought into the duct tape culture. That would come in time, when I first started in the newspaper business.

My beginning newspaper job was in a small East Texas town at an equally small circulation newspaper. We had not yet started using personal computers for all of our varied  tasks. I used a weird-looking box with a tiny screen, or video display terminal, as a word processor. The text was then copied onto a floppy disk. I think the disk was known as a “5 1/4-inch minifloppy.” The hell if I know.

The disk was later put into a machine which printed the “cold type” or text that would be pasted up on a dummy sheet. Eventually a camera-ready page was produced, and turned into a plate for the presses. The rest is history and more work, work, work.

This machine which printed out the text was huge and worn-looking. It appeared as if it would fall apart any minute. But my publisher wasn’t about to let that happen. He would seem to magically appear out of nowhere with his handy roll of duct tape and patch up that or any machine in need of adhesion. His prolific use of duct tape even became a thing of legend with the staff. Each year during the Christmas party he would get a nicely-adorned package in which the supposed “gift” turned out to be duct tape.

I have since learned myriad uses for perhaps the handiest man-made item in existence next to the flush toilet. I have even seen flush toilets patched up with duct tape. I have seen duct tape used for Halloween costumes. I personally use duct tape to patch my steering wheel.

If the Wikipedia entry on “duck tape” and its evolution into “Ductape” is to be believed then it is a rather interesting story. The wonderful tape is certainly an interesting item and one of many uses. I wouldn’t hesitate to say that duct tape has probably saved lives at some time or the other. But please remember, if you plan on using duct tape as a bandage some day be sure and have something non-adhesive for use as a dressing. Do this because, if duct tape can hold half the earth together, it will as likely relieve you of hair and perhaps a layer of skin.

Powerful stuff, that duct tape.