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Shoot! The Muffler Men done took over our state bowl game

This afternoon I am a bit on the tired side. Going back to work after more than a couple of days off — I had four in a row — is hard to do. As much as I try not to face it, I am busier than scientists studying cats flying backwards. Yeah, give me a “Huh?” It is one of my busy times of the year at work, I haven’t stopped to look at my schedule for too long because it keeps changing but it looks like I will be working every day for the next three weeks. That isn’t to say I will work a full day every day, but still, work is work when you get right down to it.

Personally, I’d like a job naming college football bowl games. Like the latest, “The Meineke Car Care Bowl of Texas.” Yes, dear friends and neighbors, that is what the Texas Bowl — I didn’t even know there was one until this past football season although its been played since 2006 in Houston which is about 80 miles away from where I live — will be called.

Meineke, isn’t that a chain of muffler shops?  Maybe the world’s largest muffler will be on display at half-time on the 50 yard line. I’m sure the world’s largest muffler is somewhere. Let me see. Well, I didn’t find the world’s largest on my first pass o’er ye ol’ Internet. Now I will be up all night looking, searching for that elusive largest muffler in the world.

Nevertheless, Meineke started out in the muffler business in 1972 and since the early 2000s the company has evolved into a full-blown “car care” service with 900 franchise stores worldwide. And they apparently forked over a world’s largest muffler full of moo-lah to have this bowl game named after them. Glasspacks anyone?

I wouldn’t mind it so much if it was the Jacksonville (Texas) Bill Day Tire Center Tomato Bowl or the Baptist Church Branch Davidian Bowl in Waco being named, well, maybe the Waco thing is a little over the top. But the Texas Bowl? Have a little bit o’ respect for your state, son! I mean, I’m not one of those secessionist like our good-haired governor. But Texas deserves a certain amount of reverence, at least if you use the name for a football contest. Why there is nothing more important in the world than guns and football in Texas. I am surprised no one has thought to playing football while armed to the teeth.

The quarterback could take out that linebacker real easy with a Glock 22, which offers 15-rounds of .40-caliber love that will make the defense think twice about crossing the line of scrimmage. Can you say, center mass? Hey, Gov. Goodhair and his band o’ Merry Men known as the Republican Texas Legislature, wants to arm college students. So it is just simple evolution, oops, that’s not discussed on college campuses in Texas anymore, it is just the natural order of things. It’s just intelligent design. That’s kind of a funny phrase when you pair it with football. Not that football players are less than intelligent. I mean, there is Terry Bradshaw after all.

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Spring break: A little common sense needed if you know someone with some

Hey, it’s party time!

Those words once made my ears perk up and had my mouth already tasting the keg beer before it ever got tapped. I still like parties, but I prefer ones in which a little sanity prevails. Even though my friends and I talk a good game about it, I am afraid the days are over of our sitting on the roof and watching the sofa — shot to hell with semi-automatic gunfire — burn in a big blaze of bonfire glory.

The big Spring Break destinations were never really my shot of tequila. About the closest I ever came to that was sharing a room with about eight or nine other guys and girls in a room we named “Motel Hell” during a 4th of July weekend in Galveston. I suppose  it was a fun outing with the exception of the incident in which a comment I made about a friend’s then-girlfriend that was not for public consumption apparently was consumed by said friend’s then-girlfriend. To this day, from what I gather, she still won’t talk to me. I don’t know why. I just happened to make the remark while another friend and I were driving off to the store in his Blazer that the aforementioned girl was beginning to get a bit of a large tush. Ah, youthful indiscretions — at almost the age of 30.

Not visiting the Spring Break hot spots then, some 25 years ago, such as Daytona, Padre Island and even Galveston, could be chalked up to my status as a “non-traditional” college student. Spending four years in the Navy and a year only working put me in university classes at age 25. I worked full-time and attended classes full-time. I also had received the GI Bill and had something many college students did not — a salary. I would usually take off work as a firefighter during Spring Break and go somewhere, but I would prefer going to visit out-of-town friends and staying with them. We still spent money and partied like it was 1999, which didn’t come for another 14 years or so. None of the vacations really stood out. They were all good.

College students today face a lot “buzz kills” we didn’t back then. The drinking age during most of my time in school was 18, until they raised it to 21 once again and forever. That doesn’t mean college students will go drink-less in places like Padre Island or Galveston. But all kinds of police enforce all kinds of laws today. If you are under 21 you might not go to jail for being caught with a brew but could get a ticket  — and a ride to jail if you are drunk and/or sass the LEOs. You can’t even drink on the beaches in Galveston except for East Beach. That is why the Bolivar beaches have flourished with the exception of  when Hurricane Ike hit and up until the time that the area recently began to rebuild.

Then there is that whole “Mexico thing.” I refer to the violence, the majority of which is blamed on drug cartels. The U.S. State Department issued a warning to travelers last year. Just recently the Texas Department of Public Safety issued their own warning.

“Our safety message is simple,” said DPS Director Stephen C. McCraw, “Avoid traveling to Mexico during Spring Break and stay alive.”

Didn’t I say “buzz kill?” But with good reason, at least according to authorities. More than 30,000 people have died in drug violence since 2006. More than 2,600 were killed in  Ciudad Juarez during 2009 alone. Also, while most of the violence has occurred in northern Mexico, there have been instances of serious crime elsewhere.

Mexico’s tourism agency says come on in, the water’s fine. Many of the more tourist-bound destinations are safe, the Consejo de Promocion Turistica Web site infers. One can link on that page to a number of flight and hotel packages to locations across Mexico. Four days in Cozumel beginning at $1,000 or Puerto Vallarta for as low as $840.

On the other hand, the Texas DPS said 65

A Texas Alcoholic Beverage Commission agent writes a citation for something or other during Spring Break at South Padre Island

Americans were killed in drug violence last year in Mexico. However, an analysis of overseas traffic accidents that was compiled by USA Today shows almost 690 Americans were killed in Mexico car crashes and more than 20,000 injured between 2003 and 2010.  Divided among those years that would account for almost 90 U.S. deaths per year.

Not to belabor the point but there are areas of Mexico clearly dangerous and driving in Mexico has always been a dicey situation. It is unfair to generalize, especially for a culture you only know snippets of relatively speaking, but the expression !si dios quiere ! which roughly means “If God wills it” is embedded in the minds of  more than one Mexican driver. Then combine that with the American expression “get the hell out of my way” and you can have a major culture clash if not a nasty and perhaps fatal car crash.

One may also say there are a number of places where one should exercise caution visiting  in the United States. At the very least there are sections of places in the United States that one should perhaps avoid. Fortunately, most of those places don’t have a beach and a bunch of half nekkid, hormone-charged kids swilling beer like it was the night before prohibition began.

Common sense should rule Spring Break decisions before and after. And I should have a million dollars. But those decisions don’t always involve common sense and I am short by just about a million. I don’t know who I am saying it to, myself being a 55-year-old man who crackles when he walks from arthritis but I was a young college student once and thus can spill more useless information than one would ever care to know. So if any college age folks are out there, I just say be careful, have a good time and stay clear of all known hazards.

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Playing with numbers

No, I am not writing about how numbers are being used to propagate the lie that federal workers are overpaid. I am not even writing about how two of every three new Texans are Hispanic, new Census data show.

Instead, I was mesmerized by the interactive information contained on the USA Today Web site that accompanies the story about the new Census information. Way before there were computers, at least in my life, I would look thoroughly over each new year’s “World Almanac” reading all the great facts and figures it had to offer. I read it little bits at a time, learning all kinds of what some would say was “useless information.”

My reading  reference books didn’t get me on “Jeopardy” — I must admit I kick ass in “Trivial Pursuit” — but it has helped me in my work as a writer and as a journalist. That is why I absolutely love the Internet, no matter its downsides. Yes, it provides more than one.

Probably the biggest find reading today’s Census information about Texas was not unexpected as I had been watching it happen and reading about over the years in Dallas-Fort Worth area newspapers. I am talking about the explosive suburban and the “exurban” growth, the latter being increased populations beyond the suburban areas of a major city or metropolitan area such as the “Metroplex” of Dallas-Fort Worth.  Since I am a Southeast Texan by birth and residence, I don’t know why but a great number of my friends live in the Dallas-Fort Worth area. A few friends jokingly, I suppose, call it the “Metromess.” Although I live within slightly more than an hour’s drive from Houston, I spent a good deal of time in the Dallas area over the past 20 years or so. I lived for almost a year in the small, mostly rich enclave of University Park, which is surrounded by Dallas and is home to Southern Methodist University. Likewise, I spent a couple of extended periods in Allen, which one could call a Dallas suburb,  or years ago an exurb, or even today be identified as a suburb of greater Plano.

That’s right. I knew the population for the Dallas ‘burbs were getting huge. But it’s another thing to see it in print.

Allen, in Collin County, grew by 93.4 percent between 2000 and 2010 and now hosts 84,246 residents, according to the Census Bureau. Plano, next door, has grown to almost 260,000. One could still see a lot of farmland and empty lots ripe for the picking when I first started visiting the Dallas area around 1980. Several other Metromess-area examples and growth over the 10 Census years:

  • Garland, 226,876, 5.1%
  • Arlington, 365,438, 9.8%
  • McKinney, 131,117. 141.2%
  • Denton, 113,383, 40.8%
  • Frisco, 116,989, 247%
  • Irving, 216,290, 12.9%

These are just a few examples. The new Census figures also showed some surprises for places I live in or know fairly well. Beaumont, where I  live, actually grew 3.9%, to 118,296, despite continual naysaying that it would lose folks. Waco, where I lived for seven years in the last years of the 20th century and early 2000s, had a 9.7% growth rate, to 124,805 people. That was not unexpected, but that it actually happened and had that kind of growth leaves me scratching my head. Why? I guess there’s plenty of prairie land and many more Baptists than you can shake a stick at. Like the old joke that continually circulates around Waco in one form or another, Waco is a town with one tall building  surrounded by 100,000 Baptists. In case you don’t know about the Baptists and Waco, the city is home to Baylor University. The Alico Building, a 22-story structure completed in 1911, was once the tallest building in Texas and West of the Mississippi. I guess you have to be there to get the joke.

William Cowper Brann, a  journalist in the late 1800s, regaled the rest of the U.S. with his tales of many people he called “Psalm-singing sons of bitches” with whom he had to deal with daily as editor of the popular magazine “The Iconoclast” based in Waco. Brann was in an almost perpetual fight with Baylor and its supporters and referred to Waco as “Jerusalem on the Brazos.” His role as an iconoclast had its shortcomings, however, he died from wounds he received in a gunfight with a detractor.

Perhaps Brann had something to do with Waco’s population past and present. I don’t know. While I met some nice folks in the seven years I lived there, it was the place I lived that I most disliked. Oh well. Things could be worse. At least unlike my journalistic forebear, Brann, I wasn’t shot and mortally wounded when I lived there.

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Hog hunters: Don’t shoot that bear

A very interesting poster caught my eye Tuesday as I was walking into a cafe located in the Big Thicket area of Southeast Texas. The poster warned hunters of the similarity — in profile at least — of feral hogs and black bears.

Such a notification would not likely raise an eyebrow in other parts of the U.S., but here in the pine and hardwood river bottoms of eastern Texas it is evocative of a bygone time when those woods were full of bears. That was a period way before my time. By the 1940s the Louisiana Black Bear was considered “extirpated” from  Texas, according to the Black Bear Conservation Coalition. That group is dedicated to restoration of the Louisiana Black Bear to its original habitat. The state listed the black bear as “endangered” in 1987 and upgraded to “threatened” in 1996. The mammals were anything but threatened in the area a bit more than 100 years before that last biological designation.

Photo -- U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service

Texas Parks and Wildlife Department information on the black bear noted that during a two-year period in the mid-1880s, two hunters in Liberty County were said to have killed more than 180 bears within a 10-mile radius of the Trinity River bottoms. A Hardin County bear hunter named “Uncle Bud” Brackin had 305 bear hides when he stopped hunting bears in 1887 because they became too scarce.

During the time I grew up in East Texas — during the 1960s and 70s — a bear sighting would be reported although such visual captures were probably as much legend as fact. I do remember in the late 60s or so that someone killed a bear, I believe, that was somewhere in the woods north of Deweyville in the south most part of Newton County. I remember hearing game wardens say that the bear probably had strayed across the Sabine River from a federal wildlife preserve in Southwest Louisiana’s Calcasieu Parish.

More bears have returned to East Texas though. One of my brothers set up a camera on a deer feeder and snapped a photo of one coming around recently. Other bears have been photographed that way as bears, despite what you see in toilet paper commercials, like to eat instead of going to the can all day. Some groups like the bear coalition want to see more bears. Such an effort faces a lot of obstacles, or so it would seem, the least of which would be people to whom bears would be unwelcome guests.

I suppose the biggest thing to take away here is from that warning poster I saw. It says hunters can mix up a bear profile with a wild hog. I guess some would say that is ridiculous but if you have ever seen any of the “pineywoods rooters” around here you would understand. Those can be some ginormous swine. Shooting a bear here in East Texas does not come cheap if you get caught either. One may face penalties of up to $10,000, additional civil restitution for what the bear is worth, jail time, and loss of all hunting privileges.

So, if you are hunting hogs out there, make sure it is a hog you are shooting and not a bear. Nor Bigfoot. He/its been known to roam around these parts too and he/it might not take to kindly to it being shot, if you know what I mean.

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The media chill out in the vast desert that is Super Bowl XLV

It appears snow and assorted other winter goodies over the past three days in Dallas has thrown the national media — especially the sports media — into a tizzy.

The New York Times trumpeted “Rare storm hits Texas, causing chaos for drivers.” Yes, it never snows here in the desert, which is what all of Texas is. You didn’t know that? Plus we all ride horses here in Texas, in the desert, on a horse with no name. That’s mainly because it’s good to be out of the rain, pardon my references to a 1970s song by the band “America.”

A three-day winter storm happens about every 10 years, a weather guy goes on to say in the story. So how rare is it really? True, this has been an exceptionally cool winter. We had some icing and a little light snow here in Beaumont, some 252 miles southeast of Cowboys Stadium, this morning but nothing off the charts. Nonetheless, we do have winter too in these parts and even more so in Dallas because it is farther north. It happens! It’s not Buffalo, but it happens.

And so many of the sports media in Dallas for the Super Bowl work themselves into a whirling dervish over whether weather like this week in North Texas — that’s how the NFL is billing it because technically the game is being played in Arlington — will prevent cities subject to snowy winters from ever capturing future Super Bowls. Perhaps they should save that question for a couple of years from now after the big game is played in New Jersey’s New Meadowlands Stadium.

Anyone with sophistication enough to know that the Super Bowl is just as much about television commercials as it is football, perhaps more so, also understand the week leading up to the big game is about hype. Hundreds, maybe thousands, maybe zillions of media members are in the Dallas “Metroplex” area this week. Some of the media include those who are really celebrities or football players or both, like Cincinatti Bengals’ receiver Chad Ochocinco, who was questioning NFL head Roger Goodell today during a news conference about the league-management labor situation. Indeed, perhaps the looming lockout by the rich team owners is the biggest question the media will ask about during this whole Super Bowl with maybe the exception of “Who won?” the game. You won’t get an unbiased answer from me about who is right and who is wrong here, management or labor. (Hint: I look for the Union label.)

Still you will hear the bitching about snow in Dallas and see stories about Steelers safety Troy Polamalu’s hair. That is because newspapers, radio, TV, Internet and whatever other kind of media are paying a lot for their personnel  to be in Dallas to cover the Super Bowl. Having been a reporter who was sent on a few trips — nothing like one of my former cohorts who was sent to Central America to study Spanish and not like one who worked for larger and richer outlets — I am fully cognizant that those who send you expect something back other than your jet-lagged, hungover self. That is send something back, like a story. Earn your keep, in other words. It’s almost 48 hours before game time and some of ESPN’s people were sitting a short while ago and broadcasting out in the cold of Sundance Square, the popular entertainment and shopping area of downtown Fort Worth. Hey, you got to do something! Rain, sleet, snow or hail, post office or no post office.

I hope the game between, who? Oh yeah, the Steelers and the Green Bay Packers is a good one and even more important, the broadcast is full of great commercials. See you all then. And, don’t some of you guys have deadlines?