Recent Comments

1. about 1 month ago on Pluggers

   I retired on the coast of texas, warm and windy. Quickly it became a grey t-shirt instead of polos, first time as an adult male, faded camo cargo shorts replaced my slacks. So flip flops instead of loafers. Came back from an Alaska trip with a bushy white beard. One day I was standing in a long checkout line at Rockport Texas’s busiest convenience store. I was stunned to see that of the 15 people in the 3 checkout lines, 9 were bearded old men (anglo, hispanic and Black) with fuzzy white beards, free t-shirts from various fishing events, faded camo shorts, a mixture of crocs and flip flops and their own giant coffee cups in for the $.79 refill. Yikes! I made a wardrobe change that same day. It sneaks up on you.

2. about 1 month ago on Cleats

   There have been a sad number of police shootings involving realistic looking pellet pistols (not bb guns but .177 lead pellets)…..which are very popular in countries that ban real pistols. Some have been unfortunately pre-teens who made the kind of bad decisions that kids that age can make…most of the adults have been damaged people seeking suicide by cop.

3. about 1 month ago on Arlo and Janis

   If you have a “modern” relatively new home built to latest Texas Windstorm code (even with its many goofy flaws) and you have a real legitimate engineer do your inspections and your finished floor level is above 26 feet (High Island, Tx is at 38 feet, my new house in Portland, Tx right on the North Shore of Corpus Christi Bay was 34 feet) the hurricane won’t destroy your home….110-120 mph winds won’t destroy a new home (our 64 year old home in Richardson wasn’t damaged bythe 90+ mph straight winds that hit Dallas this year, although tree damage was spectacular). However nearly every hurricane spawns dozens of tornadoes with windspeeds of 280 to over 300 mph. These will take any home, no matter how well built, they will even peel up the asphalt from the street. And if the tornado and rising water spares you. No power, no water to drink, no a/c, no phone, no mobility thru surrounding hi water and downed trees and live electric lines on the ground. Better evacuate early, early.

4. about 1 month ago on Cleats

   My dad gave me a real .45 automatic to take on dates in the glove box when I first started driving/dating. Have been an active shooter, gun owner for 55 years. I have not bought either of my grandsons a toy gun. It can be too hard to unlearn bad play habits when you begin to handle real guns. When my 12 year old was mature enough to take a single shot 28 gauge shotgun on a supervised dove hunt….I had to make it clear it wasn’t like a cartoon where the pellets fly like a swarm of bees. I took an outgrown pink high top sneaker from my teen daughter. Filled it with a baggie of red jello. Before the hunt we went out and I had him shoot the shoe from about ten feet away. It split and peeled open in a particularly gory way and unexpectedly sprayed both of us (in our white tee shirts)with bright scarlet “blood”. A very effective teaching moment …sobering, not funny. I never let him play “shooter” video games. They violate the first rule of gun safety, never point your gun at anyone or anything that isn’t too be shot.

5. about 1 month ago on Stone Soup

   My favorite memory of my two year old brother was in a crowded two story Sears store in Tampa in 1960. From his modest eye level he saw a red button at the foot of the up escalator. He pushed it. Screaming halt 9 people fell down. Bloody knees, a hysterical floor manager. I was a proud big brother admiring the chaos.

6. about 1 month ago on Arlo and Janis

   The last one we had in Rockport Texas they took the wide (100’) center median of the major north/south highway for two miles and piled up debris from destroyed buildings three stories high. Thats the reminder you drove past every day for more than a year.

7. about 2 months ago on Tank McNamara

   No matter what the background of his accusers, they didn’t deserve any inappropriate behaviour, if Watson assumed he could behave badly because he had done so before without consequence or criticism…he deserved the problems he experienced…but knowing attorneys, some portion of the victims deserved their day in court, some were recruited for a payday….we’ll never know how many of each kind were in the case…or how many were mistreated that did not join in the case….in our world that has developed ever stranger and stranger acceptable sexual mores…its hard to know what the truth is.

8. 2 months ago on Tank McNamara

   I may be skeptical by nature, but I have to wonder how many of those 20 women working at “massage” parlors have ever been arrested or detained for naughty behaviour. Where we live massage parlors are constantly closed by the police for prostitution. Hard to know the truth.

9. 2 months ago on Arlo and Janis

   My hill country mississippi family left me with more superstitions than I’d like to admit. One is that maybe there’s really no such thing as an inanimate object. If you talk about replacing something (car, tv, frig, house) in front of it where it can “hear” you are inviting problems in the form of breakdowns, failures, repairs. Can’t be real, right? Trust me, better to be careful.

10. 2 months ago on Flo and Friends

    I used to wear a large bulky Italian Panerai watch with a wide leather band. At a restaurant, playing with my very active grandson (30 months? Mobile but not talking? ) i helped him buckle the watch around his ankle. After a few minutes of racing around, a nice middle aged lady came to our table and looked at him saying with apparent relief “Oh good, I thought he had a court ordered Ankle monitor!” We all cracked up