10. It’s so cold, you have trouble jump-starting your penguin
9. It’s so cold, you’re shivering like Rick Santorum at a Gay Pride parade
8. It’s so cold, when Wall Street investors jumping off buildings hit the sidewalk, they shatter into a million tiny pieces
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Here, in Texas, we have an annual influx of ‘snowbirds’ … large masses of gente norteña fleeing the winter weather ‘up north’ to enjoy a season of clear skies and milder temperatures ‘down south.’ It’s a long and time-honored tradition … for many years, my great-grand-aunt and uncle made their own annual migration from Leisuretown, New Jersey down to the sun and surf of Florida. And it’s also a tremendous economic boon to parts of Texas that enjoy an annual influx of cash in return for all things leisure – goods, services, opportunities, you name it.
Not all snowbirds travel to Texas by R.V. … and it is THEY who provide US an opportunity, a chance to observe something not-often-seen in these parts of the U.S. Here’s a shot I took of two extraordinary snowbirds in Llano County, Texas, this past week. Regular visitors in the process of raising a brood of future snowbirds.
There is a nasty little radio spot airing nationally. It promotes “green” appliances and goods generally; swirly bulbs, “efficient” washers… that sort of thing although the specifics are tactically muddied. The ad pitches to a curiously young demographic. We’ve all met “Timmy”. Like Dickens’ Tiny Tim, Timmy is infectiously cute and contrived to pull at your major arteries. Timmy wants to go to the State Fair! Well, maybe he did and maybe he didn’t. Maybe he didn’t know there was such a thing as a State Fair but the announcer, whose relation to Timmy is unexplored, asks him breathlessly, “Do you want to go to the State Fair?” Of course he does! Sorry, you can’t. You see, Timmy, your parents are NOT using green, energy efficient doo-dads but the old busted bulbs and machinery, causing them to spend more on utilities and draining their pockets of the gas and ticket money necessary. If only your folks had bought the new, government approved and promoted doohickeys they would have been able to take you there for candy floss and teacup rides, whatever those are. If they get on board today then you can go to next year’s fair. “But I want to go NOW!” Radio Timmy coaches Timmies across the land in whinery to cajole mums and pops into replacing their eight-for-a-dollar earth-warming heat globes with pigtail bulbs at $8 dollars or more a pop. Needless to say, this public service message was paid for by Your Federal Family which draws its budget from you. [Read more →]
I just finished reading High Desert Barbecue, a novel by When Falls the Coliseum‘s own J.D. Tuccille. It’s a fun and very fast read (many of his chapters are only a couple of pages long). In the novel, wildly and humorously incompetent radical eco-terrorists face off against Rollo, a mountain man; Scott, a business writer with an anarchist attitude and a way with guns; and Scott’s girlfriend Lani, a schoolteacher who’s no pushover. The trio, along with Scott’s heroic dog, Champ, has stumbled on the ludicrous efforts of the eco-terrorists, who, in cahoots with local authorities, argue among themselves in absurdly rendered dialogue as they try to burn down the forest in order to drive the people away and let nature reign. A violent showdown in the canyon ensues.
The nature, hiking, and firearms scenes are authentically described, full of rich details that bring the setting and story to life. It’s a yarn, for sure — the plot escalates and there’s a good bit of silliness and quite a few funny lines of dialogue and description. Given the political extremes the characters represent, there are, as might be expected, moments of political commentary and conversation from a generally libertarian viewpoint, some blatant, but Tuccille does not preach and doesn’t let politics interfere with the advancing action. His breezy tone and brisk pacing carry the reader along a novel that combines action and satire the whole way through.
I will refresh your memory of this crappy movie without refreshing my own. The Julia Roberts character is a young law clerk who has stumbled on a terrible secret while fulfilling an academic exercise. A Supreme Court Justice has been assassinated. Why? America can only theorize as this fictional jurist was a solid conservative on a panel pretty evenly split and certain to be quickly replaced with another. Now, if he were the swing vote, everyone could understand why he was offed. Whatever the next case coming up, the culprit is whichever party stands to gain from this unexcused absence. QED. How the setting for these events, ostensibly America in the 90s, became a place where political murder was as routine as in Rome, or even on Romulus, we are not informed. But the baddies are off after a galloping Julia who has discovered that corporate Black Hats were about to do something mean, like drill a nasty hole into the ground and release the black goo within upon the surface world. And the only thing that could stop them, in court anyhow, was the status of a certain indigenous pelican as an endangered species. The late judge, certified Rightwing wanker though he was, apparently had a soft spot for sea-birds or birds altogether. He threatened an upset decision favoring the pelican so he had to die, naturally. Never asked is whether the claims of the pelican to nest and feed undisturbed were clearly superior to our claim to the oil beneath? Also never considered is whether it was quite clear that the oil drilling would be a serious, or indeed even a NOTICEABLE encumbrance to the joyous, omnivorous life of the pelican? [Read more →]
Last week, my friend Sandy sent me an email:
“Dan, do you want to come with me to Bastrop? I’m going to shoot some pictures of the ruins.”
Sandy is a photographer who documents disasters, and since Bastrop just suffered the most destructive wildfire in Texas history- a raging inferno laid waste to 1,600 houses and 34,000 acres of land – he was keen to record the aftermath for posterity. As for me, I had never witnessed the effects of Biblical hellfire before, so I was curious. I agreed to go. [Read more →]
The Obama administration claims to be concerned about the environment. One need only look at its commitment to green energy subsidies to understand how totally serious they are about taking care of the world in which we all live.
This commitment to the environment is one of the president’s most defining qualities. That’s why I was shocked to learn that the president is seeking to prop up an industry that is directly responsible for devastating environmental impact.
President Obama on Monday unveiled a plan to save the U.S. Postal Service and its employees from insolvency — a plan that includes the possible end of Saturday mail service.
As the proprietor of When Falls the Coliseum, I receive lots of press releases. I usually decline to write about the announcements sent to me, but I have decided to reproduce this one in full below. This is not a demonstration of my awesome satire-writing skills. This is an actual press release. I haven’t changed a word.
The subject line of the e-mail I received: “Celebrity Activists to Save the Ocean!” [Read more →]
How could ANYONE or indeed ANYTHING possibly go out of business just after a straight cash infusion of a half a billion dollars? Somehow Solyndra has managed it. This middle-sized firm with the maudlin name was never Too Big To Fail in its own right but it is exemplary. Solyndra is a “Green” business. You know that. And “Green” is the economic future. Green is clean. Green is keen. Green is nice, unlike those nasty cro-magnon energies like oil, gas and nukes. Even hydro power is in an infamous stink. That’s something of a puzzler, isn’t it? What could be cleaner than washing the whole landscape with cool, fresh creek water? As with so many of our current misapprehensions we suffer from Humpty-Dumpty-itis. Which is to say that the words you are hearing, Alice, do not mean what you presume they mean. Indeed, they are subject to revision or even flat inversion opportunistically by the eggshell sophists. In such an environment your most basic presumptions will fail you.
The bugaboo with this stuff is always CO2, carbon-dioxide. You are sitting in a vile cloud of it right now. Wait! Don’t go fleeing into the street. Out there is a dose of carbon-monoxide! Not an improvement and in any case the CO2 is everywhere on earth; a disgusting state of affairs. Most sadly its source, among others, is your two little nostrils. You breathe in 300-odd parts per million of this toxin and breathe out considerably more. This, the Green Advocates seek to stop. And so they should. A shocked humanity gazes in horror at its exhalations and wonders, what is this poison and how did it get inside my lungs? Was it Monsanto? Dow-Corning or Dow-Jones? Ah, it was Archer-Daniels, wasn’t it? Perhaps a blanket ban on hyphens would solve our crisis. [Read more →]
