Okay, I bet no one has thought of this yet as a solution to plugging the runaway oil leak in the Gulf of Mexico: Find a little Dutch boy some 5,000 feet tall who can stick his little toe into the blowout preventer or wherever the oil is coming from.
Ice tea but mostly ice
Is it too much to ask for a decent glass of iced tea?
I live in what most Americans would associate with the “Deep South.” I live on the upper Texas Gulf Coast. If I was to drive about 45 miles south and keep driving I’d be eventually sinking into the Gulf. So I reside in what is geographically, and pretty much culturally, the Deep South.
People in the South like their iced tea. Most drink “Sweet Tea.” I grew up drinking Sweet Tea. I also drank bottle after bottle of Coca Cola. I liked those little-bitty bottles of Coke on those smoldering hot days in East Texas. I liked anything sweet.
But at some particular time in my life I didn’t care for sweet stuff much anymore, at least as far as food and drink was concerned. I don’t know why. I still liked to drink tea. Hell, I’ve even been known to drink a Coke every now and then, mostly if it contained a shot of rum. But my tea has to be unsweetened or you will get that look like I just smelled expired milk.
I think I’ve mentioned here before that I had a great awakening about iced tea the second time I visited Washington, D.C. I was in some restaurant and asked for a glass of tea and all of a sudden: Pow! It hit me. This tea was good. It wasn’t just in that particular restaurant either. Pretty much every place I went in the greater D.C. area had tasty tea.
Then I came back home and drank tea and it tasted, well, like water with an attitude. That is what I get pretty much all the time here in Southeast Texas when I ask for iced tea. There are exceptions. But the run of the mill place — I stopped into Mickey D’s this afternoon and got an iced tea — you barely taste tea even though it isn’t terrible. It’s just not good.
I don’t drink that much tea. Usually I drink a glass of tea for lunch with perhaps a refill and I might drink one more on a hot day. I do it mainly for ice. I love ice. I eat ice. I am eating ice as I type this. I sometimes feel like a freak for my ice consumption, but I mean, can it be all that bad for you? I am just eating frozen water. I’ve seen a lot of mentions on the Internet that drinking too much tea causes kidney stones. However, some of the more serious medical sites don’t make such claims. Too much of anything is probably bad for you. Except ice. Well, maybe not.
Maybe it’s just me that thinks most of the iced tea I drink down here on the Texas coast leaves a lot to be desired. I don’t think so. Then again, I eat a lot of ice.
A bonding experience
It’s time for your weekend “Look Out For This Wanted Person Unless You Are Too Drunk or Wasted To Do So.”
Our good citizen in the picture is Arin Laron Antwine, 21, of Beaumont, Texas, a.k.a. as “Our Town” and “River City” with a capital “C” that rhymes with “B” and that stands for “Bond Jumper.” Our so it would seem.
The Beaumont Police Department said Antwine has 12 warrants for his arrest totaling a whopping $810,250. That’s almost enough money to get Dog the Bounty Hunter away from his latest escapade and looking for this guy. Antwine has six warrants for possession of a controlled substance, car theft, three for failure to identify, possession of marijuana, and criminal mischief.
All this leads me to ask: How’d he get six warrants for possession of a controlled substance (undercover sting?) and three for failure to identify? Did he fail three times during one questioning to give his correct name? Inquiring minds want to know. Not really. I’m just kind of curious but it’s not going to keep me up at night.
So troops, you know what to do. If you see Antwine, don’t try to apprehend him yourself, unless you are a big, long-haired, ex-con, bounty hunter, TV star. That’ll ’bout do it.
Fall down, go boom
The title says it all. It looks as if the Big 12 Athletic Conference is about to fall down, go boom.
Funny how one school starts talking. The others start talking. Pretty soon you got a lot of chaos and an athletic conference ends like a pair of old, ragged underwear. Not a pretty sight! The Big 12 seems as if it is folding before our very eyes. Colorado has accepted an invitation to join the Pac-10, Nebraska could joint the Big 10. The Pac 10 would also like to have Texas, Texas A & M, Texas Tech, Oklahoma and Oklahoma State.
How old is the Big 12 anyway? Like 15 years old, or something? It came as a merging of some Big 8 and Southwest Conference schools. Some didn’t get to come along to the big party from the SWC like Rice, SMU, TCU, Arkansas. Hey, it couldn’t have been the Big 16 could it?
Of course some of these schools are matched sets because of rivalries. You can’t have Texas without Texas A & M and vice versa. Ditto for Okie and OSU. Or even Texas Tech and Texas A & M.
Then there is “poor” little Baylor at Jerusalem on the Brazos. With Ken Starr as its president. What would Ken Starr do? WWKSD? Impeach ’em. Impeach the whole mess of them, that’s what.
I say have an all Texas conference: Texas, Texas A & M, Texas Tech, Rice, Baylor, SMU, University of Houston, UT El Paso and maybe rotate two of the bigger but less well-known schools for a ninth and tenth every couple of years. University of North Texas one year. Texas State the next. Lamar, once it gets its revived team on its legs. Stephen F. Austin, I’m kind of biased there, of course. Maybe the two that does the best drawing revenue and, of course, plays well might just get tenure. Texas football is where it’s at!
But that is as likely to happen as Bear Bryant returning from the dead and herding all the young Aggie team out to Junction for practice.
Money is what it’s all about. Who gives the best deal with the most TV appearances, bowls, all that jive. Forgive me for being football-centric but that is all I really care all that much about when it comes to college sports. I know basketball is huge, Texas and Rice, big time in baseball and Baylor? Tort law and intelligent design?
This will either be really good for college, especially football, or really bad. I can’t see how it might turn out in between. But that’s me.
This is news. No really, it is!
Imagine yourself being a White House news correspondent. So many issues are on the plate of the president and of the nation and you get to report on those stories: the Gulf oil spill, Israel, Afghanistan, Mexico, unemployment, I could go on ad infinitum.
None such stories of the day are as important right now to those pampered pundits though. No, the No. 1 burning question around the White House at the moment is who will get Helen Thomas’ chair?
If you will remember, crotchety old Ms. Thomas resigned as a columnist with Hearst a few days ago because she said some PI (politically incorrect) things about Jews and Jerusalem.
Because the 89-year-old news hen (Thanks to Dan Jenkins’ marvelous “Fast Copy”) was the longest-serving member of the Washington press corps she was awarded with the seat in the middle of the first row, directly in front of the podium. (And I always thought she sat there because she was too short.)
Fox News supposedly wants it. I suppose their correspondents cannot aptly insult the president or his flacks without seeing them close up.
That’s fine with me if Fox gets the vaunted chair. In fact, I really don’t give a damn who gets the chair. I remember covering presidential events in Crawford as a “local pool” member. We weren’t supposed to touch the catered breakfast worthy of a five-star New York hotel although I sometime did anyway. And in the White House press room, the supposed crème de la crème of the nation’s journalist worry about who is going to get the chair. After their rich breakfast of course.
All the great food you can eat, a good seat in the briefing room and just tons of self-importance too. What more could a journalist ask for?