Summer TV Viewing Is The Bomb

With two young kids in the house, there has been a lot of staying home and watching television. The wife and I have never been the type that need to go out all the time anyway. Family life takes center stage.
So we get into a lot of television shows. Sure, I could read a book after the kids go to bed, but I read and edit news copy all day, so going home and reading a book is a lot like a surgeon going home and removing his cat's appendix for entertainment.
At night, I want to stare at something other than words.
The wife and I used to dread the summer as far as TV goes. We'd rent a lot of videos and DVDs and catch up on shows we'd never seen before, such as "The Sopranos" and "24."
But now, there is plenty to watch in the summer.
We like "Big Brother" a lot. We used to like "The Mole" and that show where they audition singers for a rock band, but I don't think they're on anymore.
Our favorite summer shows have gotten to be beauty pageants, which are more like comedies to us. After the first round of cuts, the wife and I each pick three contestants and cheer them on, with a bet of a home-cooked meal or something on the line.
Last night, for the Miss Universe pageant, I picked Brazil, Venezuela and Mexico, while the wife picked Tanzania, USA and some other contestant whose home country eludes me right now. Whoever it was didn't go very far.
My three went a long way in the competition. It was down to Brazil and Japan in the end, with Japan pulling what I thought was an upset.
But the evening's highlight had nothing to do with who won. No, the best part was when Miss USA, Rachel Smith from Tennessee, slipped and fell hard on her butt during the evening-gown walkabout.
From what I can tell of the video, which is burning up the Internet today, she slipped on her dress. In all our years of watching pageants, this was a first.

http://www.tmz.com/2007/05/29/miss-usa-eats-it-in-mexico/

Contestants probably practice walking as much as Michael Jordan used to practice free throws and Tiger Woods hits the driving range, so the fall was equally shocking and hilarious. To make matters worse, the boisterous crowd in Mexico City loudly booed Smith later in the pageant.
Smith - who graduated from Belmont University Magna Cum Laude with a bachelor's of science in journalism and served as the managing editor of the campus newspaper - was one of my wife's picks when we watched the Miss USA pageant back in March.
The wife grew more enthusiastic in her support of Smith during that pageant when I mentioned that if she lost, I'd try to hire her for a reporter position at The Enterprise.

http://www.missusa.com/missusa/index.html

I can't imagine why the wife was not supportive of that idea. Smith seems like a fine, intelligent young woman.
Despite her infamous fall, Smith will spend the next 10 months or so doing her Miss USA duties until a new one is crowned. After that, maybe Donald Trump, the pageant king, will get her a high-paying job somewhere.
I figure Smith's chances of working at The Enterprise are about as good as her opening a walking college for aspiring pageant contestants.

Bittersweet Fun In Little China

There are six ways to get to China Elementary School from Pinewood.
The Highway. The Back Way. The Other Back Way. The New Back Way. The Other New Back Way. The Other, Other New Back Way.
Or at least that’s what my preschooler son, Curt, and I call them. It took us a good part of the fall to discover them all.
This morning, Curt and I got up early and took The New Back Way, a school year-end favorite due to its having three train crossings. Curt, 5, is in love with trains, so we decided to have breakfast by the tracks in China, a sleepy town of about 1,100 residents just west of Beaumont on U.S. Highway 90.
The New Back Way snakes through rural neighborhoods and turf farms. We pass the house where we picked up our puppy, Jack. We see old barns, stray dogs and an abandoned, vandalized convenience store out in the middle of nowhere. We see drilling rigs go up and down.
We talk about why we have to stop when a school bus stops. We speculate which trucks use diesel gas. We wonder whether the fat hawk will be in his usual power-line sitting spot. If a train comes, we stop and watch it pass.
Today was Curt’s last day at a school we were willing to take on two mortgages last year to get him into.
Through four seasons, we made the 20-minute drive between Pinewood and China Elementary School. At first, we mostly took The Back Way (a U.S. 90 frontage road) and The Highway (U.S. 90), but every now and then we took The Other Back Way, a dusty, bumpy, creepy, mostly unpaved section of Old Sour Lake Road.
I stopped taking The Other Back Way, the quickest route, after spending $700 on new struts for my SUV.
Early on during the school year, it was all about listening to a different “daddy CD” every morning. It was interesting to witness what he liked. I let him pick whatever he wanted out of the collection. He loved Coldplay, Los Lobos and Led Zeppelin, but Korn and the Butthole Surfers didn’t make it a half mile before Curt hollered for it to be shut off.
In recent months, the music has stayed off, and we mostly take The New Back Way, also known as Reins Road before curving and becoming Moore Road, with the conversation focused on whether there will be a train that day.
It’s a school year that saw the death of Curt’s pawpaw, my dad. It’s been a year of bats and bobcats, floods and horseflies, frustrating car breakdowns and the rise of a backyard treehouse, built to fulfill a promise made regarding toilet usage and diaper abandonment.
It’s a school year that started with stressful uncertainty and ended with a new ballgame, one in which a bright, happy boy, whom some knuckleheaded professionals gave little chance of normalcy, beat the odds and will go off to a mainstream kindergarten this fall.
But it won’t be at China Elementary. It will be at Sour Lake. Sadly, there are no train tracks along the way.
This morning, we got to the tracks by 7 a.m. and saw not one but three trains. There was an eastbound one that stopped on the secondary tracks and two westbound trains that rocketed past. Curt was elated.
Our morning trips to school, which started in Beaumont in January 2005, have been a father-son bonding experience. It’s not easy taking a little guy off to school and leaving him for the day, but we had to do it. Diagnosed with autism and way behind on his speech, early intervention was critical.
He stills hold my hand on the walk to class. Before I go, he still wants to be picked up and get “a kiss on both cheeks.”
But the changes have been bittersweet over the past year. A year ago, he was still pooping his diapers at night. Now, he's writing complete sentences, doing chores and devouring a beautiful world around him.

Hey, there goes my new friend
I don’t want this time to end
But I know it won’t be long
Before he grows up and he’s gone

Next year, the drive won’t be the same. It will be half the distance and void of trains.
Hopefully, our walk-to-class routine won’t change. But some day, he won’t want to hold my hand anymore. Then he won’t want me to walk him to class anymore. Maybe he’ll want to take the bus instead of having Dad take him to school.
With every little step like that, I’ll be letting him go.
Nevertheless, like it was with me and my father, our relationship will continue to grow and change. The great adventures are yet to come: the camping, the sporting events, the traveling, the navigation through life’s maze of discovery, joy, triumphs and hard knocks.
And, like it was with me and my father, I know it’s OK to let him go, because I know he’ll always come back to me.

Hey, there goes my old friend
I don’t want this time to end
But I know it won’t be long
Before he grows up and he’s gone

It Was A Very, Very Bad Snake

Wildlife excitement occurs with regularity at our country home.

We've had a bobcat, bats, deer, wasps, bees, champion-caliber fire ants, owls, mice, spiders, crawfish, hawks, golfball-sized horseflies, magnificent bushes of poisonous plants and myriad other kinds of flora and fauna.

We've had a couple of small snakes, but we knew it was only a matter of time before we got a big scary one. I started preaching the snake gospel to my boys before spring started, which got my youngest, Luke, very interested in snakes. I got him a big snake picture book, and we often sit and talk about snakes, of which, according to him, there are two kinds:

1.) Very, very nice snakes.

2.) Very, very bad snakes.

Of course, I try to convince him that ALL snakes, at least for now, are bad. I've been fearing the appearance of The Big One in our yard.

On Monday, the call came:

Wife: "There's a big ^%$#@!!!! snake on our back porch!"

Me: "What's it look like?"

Wife: "It's big and BLACK."

(My thought bubble: Uh oh!)

Me: Take a picture of it and e-mail it to me quick.

Minutes later, I got this:

That sure looked like a water moccasin to me. Seconds later, the phone rang.

Wife: Did you get the picture.

Me: Uh, yeah. I think that's a water moccasin. I'm on my way home.

Whatever it was, it was big and needed to DIE, so I blasted out of work and got home in record time. By then, the snake had disappeared, and the only place it could have disappeared to was under a big concrete back step.

I quickly rounded up various implements of destruction, including my crazy Vietnam veteran neighbor, and went to work to pry up that concrete block. Sure enough, the very, very bad snake slithered out the other side and made a break for the nearby deck. "There it goes!" my wife hollered. I leaped over there and, with a shovel, went William Wallace on his ass.

The snake's head and body were soon parted.

Rambo from next door was certain that it was a water moccasin, and so was I.

However, subsequent Internet research clouded that identification, and now I'm thinking this thing might have been a yellow-bellied water snake. I've seen dozens of pictures of water moccasins and yellow-bellied water snakes. I've seen water moccasin pictures that looked EXACTLY like our snake, but I've seen the same for yellow-bellied water snakes.

Our snake, which measured about 4 feet long, was an old-timer and most likely had been living under that concrete block for some time. We suspect the dog, which alerted my wife to the snake's presence Monday, had known about this fella for some time. The dog often burrowed under the deck and engaged in a barking frenzy. We thought it might have been frogs that got the dog riled up, but deep down, I suspected it was either a snake, possum, rat or raccoon.

Moccasins are kind of like the brown-recluse spider of the snake world. A lot of other snakes look like them, but you just have to go ahead and assume the worst.

Regardless, I'm glad that sucker is gone. I draped his still-wriggling body over the top of a backyard bush as a present for the critters we do like: the owls, hawks and other predatory birds that assist us in the never-end war on very, very bad things.

Timewaster Of The Week-May 21

This one at least has some educational value:

http://www.nerdtests.com/ft_maw.php

Basically, it's Word Jumble on steroids, but you have to make up the word, too.
It's a piece of cake to do, but it's not so easy to climb the rankings. Your ranking depends on how 200 or so others have done on that particular set of letters. The champs apparently shoot for really long words that eat up a lot of letters and score a lot of points.
I generally go for the quick-scoring low-hanging fruit while simultaneously trying to come up with longer, higher-scoring words.
The best I've been able to do so far is get to the bottom of Apprentice.

Beer Of The Week-May 18

I put Flensburger Dunkel in my Top 5 list.

An imported German beer, this red delight has a carnival of flavors but isn't as hoppy as a lot of imports. It has a little bit of a tart taste.

I like beers that don't hang around in your mouth, and despite its sharp, rich taste, Flensburger finishes clean.

It comes in a bottle with one of those old-timey ceramic pop-off caps.

Here's what others have to say about it:

http://beeradvocate.com/beer/profile/2854/6711

I think it's a nice summer beer that can go well with anything, from grilled burgers to chicken pot pie.

It is rather pricey though. Expect to pay in the $2-$3 range for a single bottle, and you'll have to go to the liquor store to find it, because I've never seen it in a grocery store.

Enjoy!

Houston Deserves Higher Road Rage Rating

I've driven in almost every major city in America, from New York City to Los Angeles, from Chicago to Houston.
Every city has its own motorist personality.
Florida motorists, for the most part, drive slow. Seattle and Dallas drivers are friendly. New Yorkers who dumbly take to the streets in their cars might find themselves sitting in gridlocked traffic for the rest of their lives, shooting the finger at each other with class, style and character.
Austin motorists on a frontage road will not yield to drivers exiting the freeway. Corpus Christi motorists on a frontage road will stop and sit at a freeway exit even if there are no vehicles coming.
Earlier this week, The Enterprise carried a story that, according to to AutoVantage, a Connecticut-based automobile membership club offering travel services and roadside assistance, ranked Houston as No. 11 on a list of American cities with the worst road rage. Cities were judged on factors such as impatient motorists, poor driving in fast lanes and driving while stressed, frustrated or angry.
Story link:
http://www.zwire.com/site/index.cfm?newsid=18345881&BRD=2287&PAG=461&dept_id=512588&rfi=8
Miami ranked No. 1. I haven't driven in Miami, so I can't speak of its drivers. But I can speak for Houston and how it compares cities that ranked higher.
I grew up in Houston. I learned to drive in Houston. I still drive around in Houston often.
And I think motorists there are the craziest, meanest, most clueless and most aggressive sons-of-guns in America.
It's almost as if, instead of taking a defensive-driving class, they are required to take offensive driving instead.
Other cities falling ahead of Houston on the road-road list were, in order, New York, Boston, Los Angeles, Washington, D.C., Phoenix, Chicago, Sacramento, Calif., Philadelphia and San Francisco.
I've driven in every one of those cities except Boston and Philadelphia. I've never been to Philadelphia, but I have been to Boston. From what I can tell, while the general populace might be the planet's grumpiest, rudest people - except on Boston Marathon day - I don't recall seeing a lot of road mayhem.
Houston freeways often look like a pond with thousands of angry water bugs zigzagging around. Approaching the city from out of town, it feels like being sucked at an accelerating speed into some kind of vortex of insanity. Rush hour is an exercise in impatience and attention-deficit disorder. Motorists ride each other's bumpers and find no satisfaction in any lane.
To worsen matters, the road-construction gods can never seem to find satisfaction with freeways. Subsequently, expansions and reconfigurations never end, leaving motorists with those dangerous, intimidating, too-close-for-comfort concrete road barriers to navigate through.
The road-rage study didn't include Beaumont, but law enforcement representatives here said motorists generally are friendly. However, one cop noted that motorists here can't seem to figure out how to merge, particularly at the U.S. 69-Interstate 10 interchange.
During the "rush hour," which by comparison is a popcorn line at the movie theater versus Houston's long wait in a post-hurricane FEMA line, northbound traffic stacks up right around where the I-10 ramp joins U.S. 69. There must be something there that makes motorists hesitate, because once you get a half mile down the road, the traffic quickly clears up.
I recently witnessed one of those rare satisfying motorist moments at that interchange. I was about to take the ramp to U.S. 69, and some impatient jackass in a pickup truck was riding my bumper, even though I was right at the speed limit. Also, there were lots of cars in a line right ahead of me, so there was nowhere for either of us to go.
Nevertheless, Johnny Jackass couldn't wait and decided to pass me on the shoulder. I immediately felt a gut-churning sense of fear and danger. But as he got even with me, an awesome thing happened: He ran over something and obliterated a tire.
BLAM! FLAP! FLAP! FLAP! FLAP! FLAP!
With nowhere to go, and me laughing uncontrollably, he dropped back and had to ride on his rim all the way down the ramp until he could get off at the Delaware exit.
He got even with me again as he headed down the exit. But before he was on the frontage road, he made my day by looking over to find me laughing, pointing at his tire and giving him an enthusiastic thumbs up.
He looked away, shook his head and drove on.
That'll teach him to mess with a battle-hardened Houston driver.

Timewaster Of The Week-May 15

This is a fun little timewaster. There are a lot of similar games out there.

The general idea is to set up weapons in strategic spots along a course/maze. The weapons then destroy "creeps" as they roll through the course. As you roll up gold/money by killing creeps, you can either upgrade existing weapons or buy new ones that are more destructive and shoot faster.

You also can sell off weapons, and you earn "interest" on the gold/money you have in the bank.

This is one of my favorites of this kind of game:

http://novelconcepts.co.uk/FlashElementTD/

I reached the point where I could get through ever level without losing any lives, and I think my best was around 18,000 points or something. I have no idea how people score 270,000 on this thing, and I don't have enough time to waste in order to figure it out.

Beer Of The Week-May 11-Mother's Day Edition

This week, I give you my all-time favorite beer: Shiner Bock.
The Spoetzl Brewery in Shiner, about halfway between San Antonio and Houston on the intersection of US-95 and US 90 ALT south of Interstate 10, has been brewing away since 1909.
In these parts, Shiner Bock can be found anywhere and everywhere, in cans and bottles, in the $6-$7 range.
Despite being a bock, or a heavier beer, it has a sweet, clean taste. It's good on a hot summer day, but the best time to drink it is around October, when that first strong cool snap hits. It has Texas-style Octoberfest written all over it. It goes particularly well with barbecue, brats or boudain.
But it also might be nice for Mother's Day. Depending on the weather - and whether my mom's oven gets fixed today - I'm either going to grill steaks or whip up a batch of my badass chicken enchiladas.
Shiner Bock is good for either.
Happy Mother's Day to all out there, and I leave you with this fine example of dynamite parenting:

http://www.livevideo.com/video/0A1E67E1A48A41D9BA4A6C5A5C4E755A/little-kid-plays-with-a-real-c.aspx

Ted Poe Goofs Up With Nathan Bedford Forrest Gaffe

U.S. Rep. Ted Poe got himself into a political pickle this week when, during a House floor speech, he quoted - and perhaps even misquoted - Nathan Bedford Forrest, a Confederate general who helped invent the Ku Klux Klan.
Trying to whip up support for more money going to troops, Poe noted Forrest's military strategy to "get there firstest with he mostest," a variation on "git thar fustest with the mostest." Forrest's actual quote in response to a question, if he even made the statement at all, was, "Well, I got there first with the most men," according to various historical sources.
It doesn't really matter what Forrest said. What matters is that Poe quoted a guy who became the KKK's first grand wingnut and wasn't exactly kind to blacks during the Civil War.
Poe's speech was about military strategy and not racism, of course, but Adolf Hitler was a military strategist, and you don't hear many politicians quoting him, right?
With liberals waiting with sharpened knives to attack anything and everything Republican, Poe handed them a fat, juicy political steak to carve into.
The gaff quickly burned up the blogger world, got mentioned in the Capitol Hill newspaper Roll Call and drew a pile-on from MSNBC's Keith Olbermann, who added Poe to his comedic "worst in the world" list. The story also went out over the Hearst news wire and appeared in today's Houston Chronicle.
The Beaumont Enterprise did its own story:
http://www.beaumontenterprise.com/site/news.cfm?newsid=18322069&BRD=2287&PAG=461&dept_id=512588&rfi=6
Whether the story snowballs or dies a quick death will be known in the coming days. As a noted history enthusiast, Poe should have known better than to quote a controversial American figure such as Forrest.
Only time will tell how much political damage has been done. I'm figuring it won't, but I'm not exactly a political junkie, so who knows?

Conflicted Over Bus Crash Charge

Perhaps had it been my child killed in the bus wreck on that rainy day last year, I would want payback. Maybe I would want someone, anyone, to take the fall, to get pinned with blame, to face criminal charges and a painful civil lawsuit.
A parents' body naturally generates the worry hormone the minute a child is born. Judging from how much my dear old mother still worries incessantly about her children, and now the grandchildren, I assume this hormone is in it for the long haul. They call it "a parent's worst nightmare," and there is no more accurate way to put it.
But I can't speak for what happens when the nightmare becomes reality.
That's why I find myself torn and conflicted over the Texas Department of Public Safety charges filed last week against a Houston man whose lost trailer load of insulation was blamed for sparking a charter bus wreck that killed two West Brook High School girls varsity soccer players.
We know little so far about the driver, Joel Martinez, who could face up to two years in jail if convicted on the felony charge of criminally negligent homicide. His poorly secured load caused death, and I can only imagine that this guy is in a world of pain that will stay with him for life. Based on attempts to interview the bus driver, we know she grieves about what happened.
Would Martinez's conviction make anyone feel better or perhaps avert future tragedies? I know that after this, I'll make sure any load I'm hauling is secured to the max.
And what about the charter bus driver, who used "overaggressive steering," according to the accident report, when she saw what turned out to be only blocks of insulation falling on the road? If Martinez must face charges, why shouldn't she?
I don't think she should, and neither should Martinez, for that matter, unless there was some especially reckless circumstances that have yet to come to public light.
But what do I know? I didn't lose a child that day.
I learned as a young driver to not panic and radically swerve if there is something unavoidable in my lane other than another vehicle, large livestock or some other huge object that could cause spectacular, potentially fatal damage if struck head-on.
My first lesson in this was when a 16-year-old friend was driving, and a kitten wandered into the road. With lots of oncoming traffic to the left and a deep ditch to the right, the only choice was to pancake kitty. Years later, I did the same thing with a poor turkey, with the impact leaving a rather humorous cloud of feathers in my wake.
Years later, a must-swerve situation presented itself while my wife and I drove from Killeen to Houston one night. Some dude in a truck was crossing a median, and his unlighted trailer stuck out into our lane. My wife, who was driving, didn't see it, but I did. "Right lane now," I said calmly. "Get in the right lane NOW, because there's a trailer sticking out in our lane."
She listened, saw the trailer and safely swerved at the last minute to avoid it. I can't imagine what would have happened had we hit that thing at 65 mph. I was so angry at the other driver that I wanted to go back and punch him in the face, but we pressed on instead, our hearts pounding out of our chests.
That charter bus carrying the West Brook students most likely would have mowed right over those insulation blocks, but it didn't. Then again, those blocks shouldn't have been there in the first place.
Similar road-obstacle situations present themselves all the time on our highways, with most of them not ending fatally. But then along comes that one that results in tragedy, changes lives forever and makes us realize how quickly life can change on a dime.
I pray for all of those touched by the West Brook bus accident, from the friends and loved ones of the two girls who died to the charter bus driver to Joel Martinez, whoever he is.
This is one of those lose-lose situations for everyone, just about any way you slice it. I just hope all can find some road to inner peace.

Timewaster Of The Week-May 7

This one is kind of the classic rock of free Internet games. It's been around for years. It's pretty simple. You run forward and throw a spear.
The hard part is timing when to rear back and when to release. You usually have to go beyond 534 to get on the board. I managed to do that once but didn't get my name up there because I wasn't registered.
Ladies and gentlemen, I give you Speartoss:

http://www.makaimedia.com/games/game_frame.aspx?gid=11

Beer Of The Week-May 4

Cinco De Mayo celebrants tomorrow will whoop it up with Corona, Tecate and tequila.
Sure, it's kind of cool to jam a lime slice down a Corona bottle, plug up the mouth with a thumb and turn it over so the lime goes to the bottom. I've always seen this as a kind of frat-boy thing to do, though.
This year, I recommend what I consider to be Mexico's best beer: Negra Modelo, produced by the same folks who brew Corona products.
Negra Modelo is a rich, crisp, not-too-heavy dark beer in the category as Shiner Bock and goes well with any meal. It can be found at every liquor store and most grocery stores as well.
A six-pack of bottles is moderately priced, in the $6 to $7 range.
Oh, and I recommend laying off the limes with this one. It has enough flavor on its own.
Fiesta!