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| August 2006 »
It is truly stunning that the Chinese plan to build their first automobile manufacturing plant in Ardmore, Okla.
The car will be an MG.
Two thoughts come to mind
First, let me get this straight: The plant is going to be in ARDMORE, OKLAHOMA?
Good Lord.
That is absolutely the last place on the planet you'd expect to be chosen by anyone to build anything, except maybe a mud hill.
It's been reported that the state offered several incentives to lure Nanjing Automobile Group to Ardmore. Part of the package was $15 million to upgrade the airport.
Where in the world was Wichita Falls when this deal was in the rumor stage?
What has Ardmore got that we don't?
Were we asleep at the wheel?
It certainly appears so.
And where was the state of Texas?
We managed to put together a package to bring a Toyota truck plant to an area around San Antonio.
So, our leaders in Austin don't want a Chinese plant? It's only 550 jobs. Shoot, that's nothing, right?
Reports indicate that Nanjing will locate its global headquarters in Oklahoma City!
This is pretty outrageous stuff, when you think about it.
Second thought:
It's to be hoped that the Chinese build a better MG than the British did.
The Brits built a lovely but lousy automobile.
It had an electrical system that was famous for its failure.
And it had a leaky roof.
I made the huge mistake in my youth of buying not one but two Austin Healys, and, boy, was I ever sorry.
Actually, boy, were they sorry.
Thankfully, the British will not be constructing this modern version.
But, it's too bad Oklahomans rather than Texans will be.
I'll wash my hands first.
Well, at least someone is reading this blog, even someone who has a snotty attitude.
You don't know squat about me, friend. I'm no commie. I participate in the economic system to the extent that I actually earn a living at a real job. I own stock. I have a 401(k). I started work when I was a paper boy. Nobody gave me a nickel, so I have always depended on the free-enterprise system.
As to your comment about the closing bell, I'm well aware that some nonprofits ring it. But, do a Google and tell me how many are nonprofits and how many are for-profits. Wonder if Ken Lay ever stood there and clapped while he was pocketing his shareholders' money?
Get a life and a sense of humor.
Throughout the day, the Austin newspaper sends me news alerts via e-mail.
They're rarely relevant, even when the Legislature is meeting. That's when they're real yawners.
When I got to work this morning about 8 o'clock, I turned on my computer, and I already had a news alert from Austin.
It just confirmed for me one more time how glad I am NOT to live in Austin.
The news alert said that the northbound lanes of I-35 had been completely shut down because of multiple wrecks involving cars and 18-wheelers. The good news was that injuries were not serious.
I'm assuming the alert meant that injuries directly related to the wrecks were not serious. No mention was made of injuries related to road rage.
I suspect that because this was a news alert sent all the way to Wichita Falls, it must have a huge impact on traffic as denizens of the capital try to make it to work on time.
Because I've never lived in a big city, I wonder what happens when you're caught up in a major wreck on your route to work. I guess you use your cell phone and call the boss and say you'll be late, but don't know how late. But, what happens to your paycheck? Are you docked for the time you were sitting in traffic? Do you work late to make up the hours?
And how can anyone living in Austin, Dallas or Houston make an appointment and ever expect to actually make it on time?
Two of my daughters live south of Houston. One evening we had a dinner reservation at a nice restaurant downtown. How, I asked the daughter I was driving with, could she possibly make a reservation in good conscience when she had no idea whatsoever that she'd be there on time or an hour late.
She just shrugged and said you gave it your best shot.
This would make me crazy, but, then, I hate to be late anywhere.
One of the reasons I enjoy listening to NPR out of Dallas as I drive my seven minutes to work every morning is the traffic report.
I'm not sure how much you'd have to pay me to go through what those people have to go through every day just to get to work and home.
It's amazing there aren't more workplace killings there.
But, I bet the hostility is so thick you couldn't pierce it with a shot from an Uzi.
As I understand it, and I admit that I may not understand it at all, every day when the stock market closes, somebody rings a bell and then this group of people comes out of a door and stands above the clock.
It's a different group of people every day, and the numbers can vary.
What's odd about this is that these people stand there with giant smiles. Some take bows. Some shake hands all around. A guy or two probably get in a little feel or pinch.
But they all act as if they have been selected Queen for a Day and get to take home the washing machine.
About this tradition, I have some thoughts:
1. Who are these people?
2. Who selects them?
3. Why do they act like they had to do with the performance of that day's market?
4. Even when the market tanks, why do they smile, shake hands, clap and hug?
5. I assume Ken Lay and his group of liars and cheaters stood up on the throne at some point and congratulated each other on the fact that they could stand there and take a symbolic leak on all the little people on the floor.
6. What happened to the people who were standing there on that black day in 1929 when the market crashed?
Did they jump? Shouldn't they have?
When he was in grad school, one of my son-in-laws' several jobs was to teach part-time in early elementary school in Memphis, Tenn.
He taught music.
As I recall learning music in first, second and third grades it was pretty simple -- at least for me. I was the kid with the sticks or with the triangle.
Even then, I just hit the sticks and the triangle when I felt like it, earning nothing but stern looks from the teacher lucky enough to have me at the moment.
But my son-in-law took music, which he loves with a passion, in a whole new direction for his young charges.
Instead of handing out sticks and triangles and kazoos and whatever else teachers find in closets to "make" music, he had kids build their own instruments.
One memorable instrument required only a certain length of PVC, the kind with a small diameter, and a bucket or pie plate. You'd string, well, string or something like it from the top of the PVC to the bottom or connect it to the bucket or plate and strum the thing like a bass.
He did a bunch of stuff like that, and the kids loved it. I'd have loved it myself. Talk about something I could master!
But, the dangest homemade instrument I've ever seen was a guitar fashioned out of an AK-47. I saw it the other night on TV.
The sound was off and I couldn't find the darn remote, so all I could do was look at him jamming.
No, the idea was not to fire off a magazine of 7.62 mm rounds. He had somehow strung guitar strings from the barrell to the stock.
It doesn't take much to imagine a whole band with instruments made from weapons. It's already a no-brainer to pluck the string on a bow.
Put together a few ammo boxes, each filled with a certain number of rounds so you get a different sound, and you got a drum set.
And for extra zing to the tympany section, you actually could punctuate specific bars with the firing of one kind of weapon or another.
I have not actually tried this, but I would bet that if you blew down the barrell of a .45 pistol, you'd get the kind of toot sound you can coax from a Coke bottle.
Back when I was in the Army, we had a weapon called a "dooper," which was actually a hand-carried grenade-launcher. We called it a "dooper" because when the grenade left the barrell, it made a "dooper" sound.
The obvious problem here is horns.
Any ideas?
Just went to the bathroom -- No. 1.
Did not wash my hands. Rarely do. Dr. Gott, who runs in our paper every day, says you don't have to.
I never have anyway. Just lazy, I guess. Or just intuitively knew Dr. Gott was right.
To my knowledge I've never gotten sick from whatever malady one might pick up from not washing one's hands after No. 1 in the potty.
I've been sick from a lot of stuff. Food poisoning, breathing toxic air on planes -- I dunno.
But, nothing secifically traceable to not washing my hands.
All of which brings me to the point:
I just saw on television that Purell has produced one more liquid that will keep your hands germ-free.
I don't know how that works or how the other Purell anti-bacterial products work. I mean, you go to the bathroom, you was your hands (some female scientist says you should wash for as long as it takes to sing "Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star" -- or is it, "Tinkle, Tinkle, Little Star"?) and then touch the DOOR KNOB, which has been touched by thousands of guys who didn't wash their hands and there you are with bacteria growing again.
I understand new research shows that the one place where you can find the most bacteria is on your computer keyboard.
I'm not sure how to deal with this.
I can use Purell on my hands, but then I touch asdfghjkl;' and it's all back on there again.
Maybe I should just do a Dr. Gott and pee on the keyboard, let it dry and forget the entire thing.
Last week, we published our monthly restaurant cleanliness scores, which are based on inspections by the local health department.
Alas, the Wichita Falls Country Club scored an 84 with five "critical" problem areas.
What happened then was Twilight Zonish.
The manager of the club called to complain about the score being run in the paper and on the Internet, saying, of course, it could affect business.
It could also have the salutary benefit of him making his kitchen help clean the place up, but that wasn't part of the convseration.
We checked out facts, and they were correct.
But, then, the manager sent out an extraordinary letter to all Country Club members attacking the newspaper and saying we had used a bad set of numbers, but also questioning our motives.
The tone was hostile, to say the least.
I don't know what can be done about it, either. The letter is wrong. The club members probably believe the worst about the newspaper; most people seem to .
I know I am certainly contemplating canceling my clubhouse membership.
I don't want to worry every time I order something that someone is going to spit on whatever is brought to the table.
Every morning while I write, either this blog or an editorial, I glance every once in awhile at CNN to read the white scrolling bar or watch the clogged airport report.
But that's the official reason.
The unofficial reason is Robin Meade.
She is, in my opinion, one of the most outstanding looking women anywhere on television today.
I've never Googled her name, so I know nothing about her. That seems a bit unseemly, I think, for a 59-year-old man to begin what is essentially looking around in the closet of someone.
I do suspect that when she was in high school, she was class favorite or beauty queen, if they had such a thing.
In college, who could concentrate on calculus or Shakespeare with her in the class?
Or maybe she's had a complete makeover from top to bottom.
I don't know. I just know she's a knockout.
So, my question is this:
Why is she still on the morning show? Or is that a prime spot that pays prime money because it draws a prime audience? I'd think that since most of her show is on when people are driving to work, it would actually pay less. Lynn Walker tells me that in the Wichita Falls area, the morning anchors make about one-half what the evening anchors make.
The trend is to replace tired old men as evening anchors with exciting beautiful women. Katie Couric is the first, I'm sure, to break the barrier.
Couric is a little perky for my taste.
Now, Robin Meade. That's another story, and someone at ABC and CBS is missing a bet.
Several years ago a very enthusiastic young man opened a men's store here.
I went in a couple of times and looked around.
But, guys don't need many things, when you get right down to it -- a few ties, a blue blazer, some grey pants, some khaki pans, two suits for funerals and weddings, a pair of black shoes and a pair of burgundy shoes, sock, underwear and a couple of belts that match the shoes.
And guys, in general, aren't shoppers. I need a white shirt, I just go buy a white shirt. I got a hole in my grey socks, I go buy a pair of grey socks.
Then the enthusiastic young man found out that he wasn't going to make it in the menswear business and he had a big sale.
I'd never bought anything in his store, so I didn't go to the sale.
Thus an ethical conundrum I've never found a solution for.
After 50 years, the Cow Lot out on East Scott is going out of business. For all those years, Nat Fleming has run the place.
Now he's having a big sale. He wants to clear everything out from wall to wall, and he's not bringing in a bunch of those ringers like so many businesses do when they turn their "going-out-of-business" sale over to a bunch of rag dealers from the Bronx.
Here's the ethical issue:
I have never set foot in the Cow Lot. Never bought one thing.
Is it ethical for me now to go in and take advantage of the situation by buying things at prices lower than I'd have paid before he was going out of business? Is this fair, since I never supported the man during good times?
But, on the other hand, if I don't, am I doing him a disservice by not helping him get rid of his inventory?
I don't know, but my default position is the first. If I didn't buy anything there when he was offering goods at regular price, I have no right to go in and take advantage of him when he's put everything on sale to go out of business.
Interestingly, I face no such ethical dilemma when it comes to one of the leech stores in the mall. These are the stores that come and go and employ gum-chewing teens and never support the community and never buy an ad.
I never go into one of them, but if they have a going-out-of-business sale, I plan to help them with godspeed.
The latest issue of Esquire magazine includes a mildly funny two-page spread listing 50 reasons it's great to be an American male these days.
I think they missed quite a few, especially when it comes to being a Texas man.
And they sure got some wrong, like three-bean chili. Real men don't eat beans in chili, at least not in Texas.
They got some right, though, good reasond for counting yourself lucky that you're not an English man or, praise the Lord, a Frenchman.
He'res my 50, in no particular order and including a few from Equire's list, which will be marked by an asterisk:
1. Drive-up beer joints like P2 and the Bar-L, where you can still get curb service.
2. The red draw.
3. Branding Iron barbecue.
4. Tascosa Hot Sauce out of Amarillo
5. That the Texas Legislature meets only every two years for six months.
6. Gene's Tasty Burger, Pat's Drive-Inn and Scott's Drive Inn.
7. The Oyster Bar.
8. Full-quill ostrich skin cowboy boots.
9. But Light.
10. Cornbread, fried okra and fresh homegrown tomatoes.
11. Mama's homemade cherry pie with fruit picked from out behind the back of the house.
12. The Davis Mountains.
13. Oil royalties.
14. NFL Sunday ticket.*
15. Friday night football.
16. Cussing and discussing Friday-night football on Saturday morning at the DQ.
17. Cornbread.*
18. Pinto beans slow-cooked with fatback.
19. Jalapeno peppers.
20. The girls of summer with their belly buttons showing.
21. 3-in-1 oil.*
22. The Alamo.
23. The Bullock Museum
24. The Panhandle-Plains Historical Museum in Canyon.
25. The Nimitz Museum in Fredericksburg.
26. The stallions at Las Colinas.
27. Perinni's steak house outside Abilene.
28. Palo Duro Canyon State Park.
29. We're not Oklahoma.
30. But, we we can drive only 20 minutes to gamble or buy cheap cigarettes.
31. Gimme caps.
33. The fact our governor has powers limited by the prescient authors of our state constitution after Reconstruction.
34. Deer-hunting in the Hill Country.
35. Pheasant hunting in the Panhandle.
36. The astronomy festival near Crowell.
36. Frontier Texas at Abilene.
37. Dell started making computers here.
38. Wine in a box.*
39. Wild hogs (Ok, this is a stretch, but there's got to be a market out there somewhere for this smelly beats).
40. Texas wineries, including the one here and the one near Alvord and the ones in the Hill Country.
41. The grilled cheese sandwich.
42. The Air Force.
43. Homemade ice cream.
44. Corsicana Fruit Cake (controversial, of course)
45. Midwestern State University.
46. Fresh peaches at Charlie, Thornberry and the Hill Country.
47. Our mixture of culturse.
48. The number of straight, off-the-beaten-path highways that's let you hit at least 100 without worry about a trooper.
49. Stocked lakes.
50. A.J. Foyt, Eddie Hill and Loyd Ruby.
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