Art Imitates Life: Rat Wouldn't Like Neighbor Kelso

To paraphrase Robert Frost, a 10-foot fence makes a great neighbor. The only omission in Kelso's honor roll of wacko neighbors was someone named "Rat." What a pity. If this is (fair & balanced) anti-social behavior, so be it.

[x Pearls Before Swine]
By Stephan Pastis

Click on image to enlarge
Copyright © 2008 Stephan Pastis

[In "Pearls Before Swine," Stephan Pastis sketches this nuanced comic strip tale, which features the arrogant, self-centered, and totally hilarious Rat, who leads his four-legged friends through misadventure after misadventure. Joining him for the journey are Pig, the slow but good-hearted conscience of the strip; Goat, the voice of reason that often goes unheard; and Zebra and the eternally inept Crocodiles who pursue him. Together this mindful menagerie mocks the flaws and shortcomings of human nature through Pastis's cynically biting wit.]

[x Austin Fishwrap]
This old South Austin house: I'm going to miss it after 30 years
By John Kelso

It was with a heavy yet whimsical heart that I left my South Austin home to move on down the road. The moving van came Friday afternoon.

My wife, Kay, daughter Rachel and I have gone 5-½ miles south down Manchaca Road to a newer neighborhood in part because, like many Americans, we have too much stuff. We needed more room.

So we leave behind the little South Austin house that has been my home for 30 years. I was 33 and young and foolish when I moved into the place in 1978, and I'm 63 and old and foolisher now that I'm moving out.

The house is packed with memories. It has been graced with dogs named Hoover, Bubba, Rufus, Harry, Belle and Ziggy, and countless cats have peed in the garage. Some have been squirt-gunned for it.

It has had a chicken in the backyard named Natalie after Dixie Chick Natalie Maines. It has had wildlife. A couple of years ago on New Year's Eve, I buried a opossum in the garden because I was sure it was dead. About 20 minutes later, it dug its way to the surface.

It was a born-again opossum.

So much has happened here. Next door, there used to be an all-night poker game. The house has been a seat of democracy. The brown mailbox by the front door is covered with 28 red, white and blue "I Voted" stickers. The place has been a center of agriculture. I've planted red potatoes out back 30 years in a row. And various guests, from famous to anonymous, have come calling.

There was the night years ago when Texas singer Joe Ely showed up at the front door unannounced about 10:30. He wanted to tell me about the hot sauce in his refrigerator for a feature story I was working on. I have no idea how Joe Ely knew where I lived. The doorbell rang, and there he was. He came in, stayed about 15 minutes and then split.

Then there were the couch potatoes who came and stayed in the living room and wouldn't split. I've had at least three of those, but only one whose belongings I had to put on the lawn to get him to leave.

In 30 years, the police showed up just once without me calling them first. That was the time some friends toilet-papered the trees in my front yard at 4:30 in the morning.

I came to the door in my pajamas, and the cop asked me if I knew the three guys standing behind him. I laughed and said I did. He let them go, and they staggered off into the dark.

This house has seen both great glee and sorrow. It has been sung in, and it has been screamed in. It has had its halls decked. One year, a friend nicknamed Crusher put a funny ornament he called the "Christmas Pickle" at the top of the tree. It was, in fact, a smiling pickle. The home has been the location of heated arguments about whether the tree was standing up straight in the stand. And where that ball should hang.

This house has had wonderful and colorful neighbors, all of whom I will miss.

I'd like to say thanks to Bernice, a next-door neighbor who has lived in the neighborhood even longer than me. Bernice likes to go to Vegas and throw clothing onstage for Tom Jones. Bernice just got back from Branson, Mo., where she got her picture taken with an Elvis impersonator. She showed me the photo the other night in the driveway.

Then there's Mary, my other next-door neighbor. You don't mess with Mary. We used to have some neighbors who had an outside dog that barked from loneliness. One day, Mary looked out and saw the dog out there shivering. It was sleeting. So Mary called 311, and the cops came.

Next thing you knew, Mary says, the man of the house was running out to ask Mary, "Are you the bitch who called the police?"

"That would be me," Mary said calmly.

The guy then said he should jump the fence and kick her butt.

"Go ahead on; it'll be the last thing you do," Mary said.

He went back into his house. Good choice.

Jerry lives two doors down, and he's the neighborhood watchdog. If it happens in the 'hood, Jerry knows about it. Jerry has a little Pekingese named Tiny. Sometimes, you'll see Jerry driving down the street with Tiny in his lap. It looks like Tiny is driving. Sometimes Tiny wears a little orange University of Texas shirt. Maybe Tiny has season tickets to football games.

Then there's old Mr. C. who lives across the street, one of the nicest men I've ever met. (That's not his real name; that's just what I call him.) Each spring, Mr. C.'s cottonwood tree would bloom, and balls of tree fluff would blow all over. And every spring, here'd come ol' Mr. C., trudging across the street to apologize for his tree.

I'd always tell him it didn't bother me. He'd always say he'd been meaning to cut that tree down.

Then there's my buddy Rich, who lives around the corner and decorates his yard at Christmas with a huge peace sign. It has a diameter of 14 feet. It's a trampoline stood on its side and decorated with Christmas lights.

So, goodbye, old South Austin neighborhood. Thanks for the sweet memories and for making my life such a rich one for 30 years.

[John Kelso is a transplanted New Englander who has been performing as a redneck in Austin for 30 years. His unspoken mantra is "I wasn't born in Texas, but I got here as fast as I could." His column appears thrice weekly (Sundays, Tuesdays, and Fridays) in the Austin Fishwrap.]

Copyright © 2008 The Austin-American Statesman

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You'd Be Plumb Loco, Too, If You'd Been Bitten Successively By A Krait And A Cobra

Idiots are generally serene. The Dubster just smiles and smiles and smiles (and cracks wise). If this is (fair & balanced) retribution for electoral stupidity, so be it.

[x NY Fishwrap]
Soft Shoe in Hard Times
By Maureen Dowd

Everyone here is flummoxed about why the president is in such a fine mood.

The dollar’s crumpling, the recession’s thundering, the Dow’s bungee-jumping and the world’s disapproving, yet George Bush has turned into Gene Kelly, tap dancing and singing in a one-man review called “The Most Happy Fella.”

“I’m coming to you as an optimistic fellow,” he told the Economic Club of New York on Friday. His manner — chortling and joshing — was in odd juxtaposition to the Fed’s bailing out the imploding Bear Stearns and his own acknowledgment that “our economy obviously is going through a tough time,” that gas prices are spiking, and that folks “are concerned about making their bills.”

He began by laughingly calling the latest news on the economic meltdown “a interesting moment” and ended by saying that “our energy policy has not been very wise” and that there was “no quick fix” on gasp-inducing gas prices.

“You know, I guess the best way to describe government policy is like a person trying to drive a car in a rough patch,” he said. “If you ever get stuck in a situation like that, you know full well it’s important not to overcorrect, because when you overcorrect you end up in the ditch.”

Dude, you’re already in the ditch.

Boy George crashed the family station wagon into the globe and now the global economy. Yet the more terrified Americans get, the more bizarrely carefree he seems. The former oilman reacted with cocky ignorance a couple of weeks ago when a reporter informed him that gas was barreling toward $4 a gallon.

In on-the-record sessions with reporters — and more candid off-the-record ones — he has seemed goofily happy in recent weeks, prickly no more but strangely liberated and ebullient.

Even though he ordinarily hates being kept waiting, he made light of it while cooling his heels for John McCain, and did a soft shoe for the White House press. Wearing a cowboy hat, he warbled a comic Western ditty at the Gridiron Dinner a week ago — alluding to Scooter Libby’s conviction, Saudis getting richer from our oil-guzzling, Brownie’s dismal Katrina performance, and Dick Cheney’s winsome habit of withholding documents.

At a dinner on Wednesday, the man who is persona non grata on the campaign trail (except for closed fund-raisers) told morose Republican members of Congress that he was totally confident that “we can retake the House” and “hold the White House.”

“I think 2008 is going to be a fabulous year for the Republican Party!” he said, sounding like Rachael Ray sprinkling paprika on goulash. That must have been news to House Republicans, who have no money, just lost the seat held by their former speaker, and are hemorrhaging incumbents as they head into a campaign marked by an incipient recession and an unpopular war.

If only they could see things as the president does. Bush, who used his family connections to avoid Vietnam, told troops serving in Afghanistan on Thursday that he is “a little envious” of their adventure there, saying it was “in some ways romantic.”

Afghanistan is still roiling, as is Iraq, but W. is serene. “Removing Saddam Hussein was the right decision early in my presidency, it is the right decision now, and it will be the right decision ever,” he said, echoing that great American philosopher Dan Quayle, who once told Samoans, “Happy campers you are, happy campers you have been and, as far as I am concerned, happy campers you will always be.”

W. bragged to Republicans about his “considered judgment” in sending more troops to Iraq and again presented himself as an untroubled instrument of divine will. “I believe there’s an Almighty,” he said, “and I believe a gift of that Almighty to every man, woman and child is freedom.”

Although the president belittled the Democrats for their policy of “retreat,” his surge has been a temporary and expensive place-holder for what Americans want: a policy to get us out of Iraq.

“Has it allowed us to reduce troop levels to below where they were when it started?” Michael Kinsley wrote recently. “The answer is no.” Gen. David Petraeus told The Washington Post last week that no one in the U.S. and Iraqi governments “feels that there has been sufficient progress by any means in the area of national reconciliation.”

Maybe the president is just putting on a good face to keep up American morale, the way Herbert Hoover did after the crash of ’29, when he continued to dress in a tuxedo for dinner.

Or maybe the old Andover cheerleader really believes his own cheers, and that prosperity will turn up any time now, just like the W.M.D. in Iraq.

Or perhaps it’s a Freudian trip. Now that he’s mucked up the world and the country, he can finally stop rebelling against his dad and relax in the certainty that the Bush name will forever be associated with crash-and-burn presidencies.

Whatever the explanation, it’s plumb loco.

[Maureen Dowd, winner of the 1999 Pulitzer Prize for distinguished commentary (the scandals leading to the Clinton impeachment), became a columnist on The New York Times Op-Ed page in 1995 after having served as a correspondent in the paper's Washington bureau since 1986. She has covered four presidential campaigns and served as White House correspondent. She also wrote a column, "On Washington," for The New York Times Magazine.

Ms. Dowd joined The New York Times as a metropolitan reporter in 1983. She began her career in 1974 as an editorial assistant for The Washington Star, where she later became a sports columnist, metropolitan reporter and feature writer. When the Star closed in 1981, she went to Time magazine.

Born in Washington D.C., Ms. Dowd received a B.A. degree in English literature from Catholic University (Washington, D.C.) in 1973.]

Copyright © 2008 The New York Times Company

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