Well, hell.

The loss of Ray Charles ranks right up there with the loss of Johnny Cash for me. I'm damn speechless.

Well, I guess I better finish up my big panicky story from yesterday. There's a whole bunch of pictures under the MORE button that illustrate this tale, but the bottom line is that everything and everyone is safe, and we were ultimately only slightly threatened. It still threw me for a loop. And I'm still pretty nervous about snakes.

So if you want to see the dumb pictures, click below...

Has the Poor Man become the poor man's Poor Man? I used to be able to read and enjoy Andrew because he did a lot of original and funny content, and I actually considered many of his points.

Lately, though, he's just weirdly wrong, with long batches of quoted material followed by some snarky thingy. And crap like complaining about t-shirt vendors, polls as something that mean something, and just general not-Northrupp stuff.

Oh, well...people change, cest la vie. I'm probably wrong.

Damn, man...the Iggster has cat trouble. Not good, my friends.

Not being a cat person, I can't relate. Being a goofy animal person, I can relate. Best wishes and a little prayer to Monty. May he come out the other end of this trial goofier and cattier than ever.

Yahoo! News - Scientists Say Dirty Bomb Would Be a Dud

The "dirty bomb" allegedly planned by terror suspect Jose Padilla would have been a dud, not the radiological threat portrayed last week by federal authorities, scientists say.

So I guess these eggheads wouldn't mind having one go off under the table at their next family dinner?

They just plain don't get it -- you say uranium, and you say explosion, and you've got terror on your hands. It's not the actuality, it's the psychology.

So, thanks for chiming in, eggheads. I admire your efforts to educate the hoi-polloi about the periodic table and so forth, but...I don't think it's gonna take any more this time than it did last time. If it does, superb...we're all smarter! Whee!

Good gawd. Bob Costas is quite easily the most boring & smarmy man on the teevee. I remember when he used to be a good, nay, GREAT sportscaster. Why is he reduced to talking to Ben frikkin' Stiller? Did he piss somebody off?

I've said that a million times, but right now I really, Really, REALLY mean it. The Brazos is flooding, and there's no end in sight. I talked to one of my partners at noon, and he said that Lake Granbury was gonna have to open to a 54,000 cfs release today. Well, that's more than I've ever seen, and I can't imagine it. I have horrible visions of my new electrical work and all of my luxury tents and who knows how many pecan trees washing away.

Right now, the river is up past the first cut, past the second cut, and about to start in on the third cut. The third cut is the bottom land where the campground, and about $20,000 in improvements are. Make that $20,000 of uninsured improvements. Gack.

Here's some graphical idea of what we're facing:

One little irony: I just last night finished reading John Graves' Goodbye to a River, and I can remember thinking, well, with all the dams that came after the book, we'll sure never see anything like the days of yore.

60 MINUTES LATER UPDATE: Jeebus, it's up another 4 feet since I got here. It's past the fence in three places. The eastern end is basically underwater. We "evacuated" everything that's not nailed down in one of the tents. Word is that Possum Kingdom is gonna have to start releasing water. If you look right now (5PM CDT), you can see a 43000 cfs release @ Granbury. Grrrr...dumb Corps, dumb dams, dumb constant level lakes.

Hey, Alan -- how about a little help with some decent forecasting down here?

Well, now that I have the eyes of 1.5Blowhard readers for a few seconds, here are a few tips for you on the latest and greatest of Texas, the true home of Country Music (as denoted by The Man).

Numero uno, make it a point to check out Jack Sparks' Other Side of Country regularly. He does this for a living, where I do it for a hobby. And there's the minor matter of he's a damn writing genius. It's a crying shame he's in Minnesota and not here in Texas somewhere. Ideally, Jack would be in one of the outlying Austin towns so he doesn't get corrupted by the hippies, but I guess I'd let Austin have him if he insisted.

Numero two-o, go get Opie Hendrix' San Jacinto right now. Opie is a long-time undiscovered favorite of mine, and it's my life goal to make Opie a household word. He's pretty much all that's good about Texas music: blues, twang, swing, stomps, honky-tonk singalongs, even some wacky do-wop. Here's my review of San Jacinto, if you need more info (but you don't.) Opie is even endorsed by Commies in Canuckistan.

Numero tres, check out The Wife's endeavour, TexasGigs.com. She's on top of all the local and not-so-local Texas Music scene, including concert calendars, band news, links to other Texas Music sites, and general gossip. Personally, she talks too much about music that could have come from anywhere and not enough about honky-tonk, but I don't run the world. Yet.

I don't really have a number four, so here's a shameless, self-serving plug: be sure to come down to our Ninth Annual Raz on the Braz in August, and see many of the people who keep the Texas Music scene hootin' and hollerin'. You might go home sweaty, but you will also go home full to the brim with good music. I've got links to all the artists that have pages, and all of them have links to where you buy their music. I wholeheartedly recommend buying direct from the artist or off their website so they can get the most money for their effort.

So, I guess that's kind of it. I'll endeavour to do more music stuff, MvB...I know I've been slacking.

Jerry Jones has taken his toys and gone home. I guess he was pretty unhappy with the speed that the horribly dysfunctional county government was moving, and just about any business person would agree with him. Jerruh wanted something to happen, some movement or negotiations, by June 30. Of course, the county people immediately started bowing up and talking big talk about how they weren't gonna get pushed around. However, it seems his people cancelled a couple of meetings with the county people over the last couple of weeks.

Since I am outta here as fast as humanly (and kidly) possible, I guess that a hearty Screw 'Em Both! is in order. I don't want to see JJ snarfing down tax dollars, and I don't want to see the idiot Dallas County Commissioners being their big ol' puffed-up-toad selves.

Move the Pokes to Ft. Worth. Let the Bass Brothers deal with all this BS. Or Plano. I don't care. By the time they finish building this boondoggle, nobody in the city of Dallas will be able to afford a seat, anyway. Move it to Collin and let the Escalade & Lexii dudes pay for it. They won't mind.

...to never bother typing another word in this dumbass "web" "log" -- Colby Cosh, on his hockey page:

At the very least, let's have a little decorum and not give a victory lap with the Cup to the stick boy. It's a simple matter of issuing sidearms to the custodians of the trophy. They should also have a broad mandate to shoot the players' children, who now throng the ice when the Cup is won and wander around crying and confused, giving the whole thing the air of a GE company picnic.

[...]

It was a perfect ending to the NHL season, and perhaps to the NHL as we know it. I'm not saying that just because Calgary now has the dubious honour of being the first Alberta team to cough up a 3-2 lead in the Stanley Cup. Although, man, typing that sure feels pretty awesome. Wait, let me "console" the Calgary fans out there.

Aw--you came so close. I bet it hurts to have your boys choke like that. There, there. There, there.

[...]

Here's an ad for Labatt's low-carb beer. How can you tell this company is owned by Europeans now. Is low-carb beer for the guys who don't feel like quite enough of a self-absorbed candyass drinking ordinary light beer? Labatt's Sterling: makes you drunk, tastes like cod-liver oil, but lets you keep the slender frame of a metrosexual twink.

[...]

What do you suppose all those laid-off NHL organists are doing nowadays? Interrupting Lutheran church services with "Doo-doo-doo-DOOT doo-doooooo! Chaaarge!"?

I could try to write stuff that frikkin' funny for the next 40 years and not come close. Genius, my friends...genius.

So, yeah -- I couldn't resist watching Game 7 of the Stanley Cup finals, even though they lacked my sad-sack Stars. I am definitely not enjoying the idea of a lockout next year. The Stars are my boys, the team that gets me from the end of the Cowboys season to the start of the stRangers. I've come to love hockey, after a long and tortuous road that any sports nut will understand. I still can't get behind the NBA and the Mavs -- too exotic, too full of bajillionaire genetic freaks with weak minds. And they've got otherwise-sane and respectable-and-in-general-worth-looking-up-to Mark Cuban as the owner, who manages to come off as a genuine nut just about every time I see or hear him on the airwaves. I don't think I watched more than two Mavs games this year, and that was with a book in my hand. Background noise.

The Stars, though -- that's different. Man, I sure hope they can patch things together in the NHL, but all signs point toward nuclear annhilation. That's ugly.

Yes, it's time again for goofy cliched pictures from my beloved Republic.

Inspired by Rana over at Eclectic Mind, I tried to take some flower pictures. Well, I think I waited a couple of weeks too long to get any really good ones. I had a nice stand of bluebonnets, and I always have a boatload of Indian Paintbrushes. But now all that's left are the little white flowers that grow in the middle of bullnettle. They're pretty, but it kinda captures the Texas cliche that everything here will either sting, stick or bite you. This particular bullnettle will be shredded by next week. I hate those things.

I have no idea how I captured this. I was trying to get some good post-thunderstorm cloudbank pictures. The ones that I did get failed to capture the two elements I wanted: their massive towering height, and their glowing luminosity. The camera I have is just inadequate to the task. But I found this one when I looked, and I was surprised. Probably just a bad snap, but it's pretty angry looking, isn't it?

My new Memorial Day flag. I love the way a new flag looks, and I love looking at mine dance in the wind (of which we have plenty, thank you.)

That's that -- 30 pictures and three are worthwhile. Yeesh. I need a new camera. The digital SLRs are just too damn much right now, though, and that's what I'm holding out for. Point-n-shoots are pretty nice, and I bet that the one I have has options and capabilities that I don't even know about, but -- I need that big body and that shutter click and that f-stop ring and the focusing capabilities of a good, solid lens. I'm an old dog -- new tricks don't come too easy anymore.

I'm really bushed, kiddies. This weekend was easily as busy as the last one, and then I went and ate a big steak with my pard, Toby last night, and then I stayed up late reading a bunch of Reagan stuff all over the interweb.

All of these days piling on top of each other are wearing me out, so I'm gonna go read a durn "book." You remember those...you turn the pages, instead of clicking to them.

Here's some good fun for you to while away the hours if you don't have a "book" for yourself:
- Big Al's Wacky NYC Trip (7 oz of Angus ain't all that much, but it's a pretty good start, especially if it's on a bun) -- he got to see the little Rangers one win this weekend over the Hated Yankees. There are two days' worth of tomfoolery, one with Pauly, and reading it exhausts me even further.
- Iggy has the world's longest poker post in the history of poker blogging. I haven't even gotten one-third through it. The boy just doesn't believe in the "shorter, more often" ethos.
- A gorgeous photo-diary of a trip through the (many) hallowed halls of Texas BBQ that I found at Big Dick Bennet's place.

See ya round like a donut.