Happy New Year!

"Be always at war with your vices, at peace with your neighbors, and let each new year find you a better man." -Benjamin Franklin

Be afraid... BE VERY AFRAID!!!

My Houston Cougars win the Armed Forces Bowl, beating Air Force 34-28... it is the Cougars' first bowl win since 1980.

Our crosstown rivals, the Rice Owls, DESTROY Western Michigan in the Texas Bowl, 38-14 (and it wasn't nearly that close)... Rice's first postseason win since the infamous 1954 Cotton Bowl... Nineteen Fifty Freaking Four!!!

I now fear that the end may, in fact, be near... I'm starting to put some stock in this whole 12/21/2112 thing! :-(

Brown paper packages tied up with strings...

In my days on this world, I've found that I've been blessed with a natural aptitude for a great many things... and beyond this, I've found that if I work at an endeavor, I can, more often than not, pick things up rather well... I'm a pretty quick study. However, neither of these apply when it comes to my gift-wrapping efforts. My parcels usually end up looking like they were prepared by a Parkinson's patient during a magnitude six earthquake. Gift bags and tissue paper are a wonderful crutch upon which I lean heavily, because I don't think it's an overstatement to say that my gift-wrapping makes the baby Jesus cry.

And speaking of our Lord and Savior... HAVE A BLESSED AND MERRY CHRISTMAS, EVERYBODY!!! :-)

"And behold there was a very stately palace before him, the name of which was Beautiful." -John Bunyan

After a five-year hiatus, this week my family (thanks entirely to me) revived a longstanding holiday tradition and took in Houston Ballet's annual production of "The Nutcracker"... and it was wonderful. Behold, the lovely view from Founder's Box 3...



Sorry it's nothing but a curtain shot... they're understandably touchy about people recording images (moving or otherwise) of the actual performance... you know, copyrights and all.

From "The Blues Song"

A blues man needs a nickname
And everybody calls me Two Shoes
Cause I always wear two shoes
I know it's not much of a nickname
But by the time I got around to getting my nickname
All the good ones were taken
Take for example Blind Lemon Lipschitz
Blind Lemon Lipschitz gouged out his own eyes with his thumbnails
So he could be called blind lemon
It's true, don't laugh

Bail THIS out, buddy!!!

Here's an interesting little morsel of automotive industry information to digest, courtesy of Stephen Spruiell of National Review magazine...

"GM employees who don’t opt for a buyout or early-retirement package will qualify for GM’s supplemental unemployment benefits, meaning that GM will make up the difference between their former wages and their state unemployment checks. When the unemployment checks run out, GM will pay these workers 95 percent of their former wages for up to two years, depending on seniority. Workers with at least ten years of seniority are eligible for the Job Opportunity Bank Security program. This is the notorious jobs bank that allows laid-off workers to receive their regular hourly pay while sitting around doing crossword puzzles or reading the paper. If GM offers these employees an opportunity to transfer to another plant, they have the right to turn down a limited number of such offers. And if no offer is made, they can stay in the jobs bank until they retire. GM currently has around 1,400 workers nationwide in the jobs bank."

Um... WOW! So, while Ford says thanks, but no thanks, to the "opportunity" to sell their soul to the federal government, General Motors, not exactly efficiently-run financially based on the above reading, and privately-held Chrysler (owned by an investment firm... NAMED AFTER THE HOUND OF HELL, FOR GOD'S SAKE!!!) continue to stand on the corner, cup in hand. If the ten years and 180,000 miles I've gotten out of my Mustang (so far) hadn't already convinced me, the panhandling of GM and Chrysler has cemented it... when it comes time to buy a new car, I'll have a shiny, new Ford in my driveway.

Golden MySpace Classics... Texas' Citadel of Stupidity's Greatest Hits, Vol. 5

Original post date: June 19, 2007 - Tuesday

Hey, stinky... IT FLOATS!

Is it the name of a seafaring vessel? Is it a brand of adult diaper? Hell, it could just be both!

Freedom

Independence

Assurance

Southern Breeze

Crosswinds

The Poopdeck

High Tide

Outback (actually, that would only work in a RV/diaper context... sorry)

Warmer Waters

Drift Away

Breezy Stream

H.M.S. Absorbent

This and That

It'd be a blast to go to the beach,
Though I think I'll head down to the shore.
I should make it out to the mall,
Nah... guess I'll set out for the store.
I've been meaning to tend to my lawn,
But I better go work in the yard.
I fancy myself a poet,
Yet I'm really merely a bard.
This nonsensical spiel should be stopped,
'Cept It'd be for the best if I quit.
Exemplar, these verses of turd...
Yes, there's been enough of this shit.

:-)

Match in the gas tank... BOOM! BOOM!

So...

I sit down to enjoy the morning's third cappuccino because, hey, who doesn't like to start the day with a severe case of the sweat 'n' shakes??? I hear, seemingly much like every other business venture nowadays, that the fine folks at Starbucks, my hosts for this moment, are in a bit of a fiduciary fix. I wonder... how can a company that charges four bucks for three cents worth of coffee be in any sort of monetary mess? I wouldn't think that a couple of six-dollar-an-hour baristas would lead to much in the way of overhead... perhaps having locations on three different corners of a single intersection is over-saturating the market just a wee bit... whatever. Anyway, as I begin to quiver down the robust brew, I suddenly flash back to those ads for some type of international relief fund... "for the cost of a daily cup of coffee, you can change the world," they told us. At the time, I seem to recall this "cost" being somewhere between 35 and 50 cents. Ten, fifteen, twenty bucks a month and I could feed a hungry child who had the misfortune of being born somewhere south of the Sahara. As I pop back into the present, I contemplate what could now be done with cost of a daily cup of coffee... a taxpayer-subsidized, government bailout of Starbucks, of course!

Match in the gas tank... BOOM! BOOM!

They say it's the thought that counts.

I just saw an advertisement for the Texas Lottery, extolling the virtues of lottery tickets as a great Christmas gift. Lottery tickets... lottery tickets for Christmas. Really? Lottery tickets??? Lottery tickets as a Christmas gift (I'm beginning to feel a bit like Allen Iverson). WHAT AN ABSOLUTELY AWFUL THING TO GIVE AS A CHRISTMAS GIFT!!! Come on... I'm quite certain that giving lottery tickets for Christmas makes the baby Jesus cry.

"When beggars die there are no comets seen..."

That from Shakespeare's Julius Caesar. If true, it's a bad time to be a panhandler in our nation's fourth largest city.

So, after 12 seasons and four straight WNBA titles, the Houston Comets are no more. I am neither surprised nor heartbroken (though I really hate to see any such venture fail as it usually involves people incurring some degree of financial ruin and a lot of lost jobs). I was present, in a professional capacity, at The Summit (later known as Compaq Center and ultimately home to Joel Osteen's Lakewood Church) on August 30, 1997 when the Comets defeated the New York Liberty 65-51 to claim the WNBA's inaugural championship (as mentioned earlier, they would go on to also win the next three). At that event, I experienced my career's single-most unpleasant encounter with an athlete in an attempted exchange with Sheryl Swoopes (apparently, she was pissed because she didn't play after having come back from missing the entire season due to her pregnancy). Head coach Van Chancellor (member of the Basketball Hall of Fame, by the way) had agreed to be a live guest, in-studio, for the debut of our half hour sports show, Extra Points (still on the air, every Saturday evening, all these years later... hey, we outlived the Comets!). Amongst my assigned duties that day was making sure the coach got to the car the station had hired (hey, we know how to treat our guests!) in time to make it over to the studio for the show. This was an experience made interesting by not only the challenge of pulling the coach away from celebrating his freshly-minted title, but also by the fact that about 23 members of his considerably corpulent family were apparently "coming with". I submit that one cannot have truly lived until they have witnessed a stretch limo become something akin to a clown car. Upon our arrival at the station, an obese army of the sons and daughters of the Mississippi soil emerged, one-by-one, from the now low-riding limo, like so many 25 cent gumballs from the vending machine at the mall. It was a sight to see!

Ah, memories... Rest in peace, sweet Comets.