Thursday, April 09, 2009

And Another Thing....

Texas wildflowers in springtime touch the blogger's soul (or some other low spot). If you can't drive Texas highways in the Hill Country, watch the slideshow below that accompanies Gary P. Nunn's anthem, "What I Like About Texas." If this is (fair & balanced) iconography, so be it.

[x YouTube/SammyTexas Channel]
"What I Like About Texas" (1997)
By Gary P. Nunn and the Sons of the Bunkhouse Band
Slideshow by Jeremy/Jeremiah Oldham


You ask me what I like about Texas
I tell you it's the wide open spaces!
It's everything between the Sabine and the Rio Grande.
It's the Llano Estacado,
It's the Brazos and the Colorado;
Spirit of the people down here who share this land!
It's another burrito, it's a cold Lone Star in my hand
It's a quarter for the jukebox, boys,
Play the Sons of the mothers of the Bunkhouse Band!

You ask me what I like about Texas
It's the big timber round Nacadoches
It's driving El Camino Real into San Antone
It's the Riverwalk and Mi Tierra
Jamm'n out with Bongo Joe
It's stories of the Menger Hotel and the Alamo!
(You remember the Alamo!)

It's another burrito, it's a cold Lone Star in my hand!
It's a quarter for the jukebox, boys,
Play the Sons of the mother love'n Bunkhouse Band!

It's another burrito, it's a cold Lone Star in my hand!
It's a quarter for the jukebox, boys,
Play the Sons of the mother love'n Bunkhouse Band!

Well, you ask me what I like about Texas
It's Bluebonnets and Indian Paint Brushes
Swimming in the sacred waters of Barton Springs
It's body surfing in the Frio
It's Saturday night in Del Rio!
It's crossing over the border for some cultural exchange!

It's another burrito, it's a cold Lone Star in my hand!
It's a quarter for the jukebox, boys,
Play the Sons of the mother love'n Bunkhouse Band!

Well, you ask me what I like about Texas
Well, I could tell you, but we'd be here all night long ♥
[x Wikipedia]
Gary P. Nunn is a Texas singer/songwriter. He was born in Brownfield, Texas, and was a member of Lubbock, Texas rock band The Sparkles during the 1960s. In 1995, Nunn was inducted into the West Texas Walk of Fame, and in 2004, into the Texas Hall of Fame.

In 1968 he was a pharmacy major at the University of Texas at Austin. By the 1970s, Nunn was backing Jerry Jeff Walker with the Lost Gonzo Band, which parted ways with Walker in 1977, with Nunn later moving on to a solo career. "Austin City Limits" on PBS has made the songwriter's "London Homesick Blues" its theme for more than two decades. The refrain "Home with the Armadillo" may have referred to the Armadillo World Headquarters in Austin's heyday as a countercultural center in the 1970s.]

Copyright © 1997 Gary P. Nunn

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Copyright © 2009 Sapper's (Fair & Balanced) Rants & Raves

Bamm Bamm Rubble Was Funny(?) On "The Flintstones" — Bam Bam In Our Times Ain't Funny!

Eags takes on the gun culture that "makes us less safe," a phrase made popular by The Dickster when he babbled about our national (in)security. In Texas, we are less safe because the State Legislature is in session. The wackos who occupy the House chamber want to convert college campuses into free-fire zones. The statewide ban on firearms on college campuses should be rescinded so that students and professors can return fire at a rampaging gunman (gunwomen, anyone?) in a classroom or elsewhere on campus. Hell, why not encourage guns in the football stadium or the basketball arena. Zebra makes a "bad" call: Bam Bam — We're Number One! If this is (fair & balanced) folie à deux, so be it.

[x NY Fishwrap]
The Guns Of Spring
By Timothy Egan



Tag Cloud of the following article

created at TagCrowd.com

Bam, bam, bam. Three dead in Pittsburgh, cops, all of them, murdered by a man with an AK-47 who thought President Obama was going to take away his guns.

Bam, bam, bam, bam. Four dead in Oakland, also police officers, their lives ended by a convict with an assault rifle.

Bam, bam, bam, bam, bam. Five dead in Washington State, kids mowed down in a trailer park by their own dad, a wife-abusing coward with a gun.

Bam, bam, bam, bam, bam, bam, bam, bam, bam, bam, bam, bam, bam. Thirteen dead in Binghamton, N.Y., immigrants and their teachers slaughtered by a shut-in with a Glock and Beretta. He sent a delusional note, in fractured English but for the sendoff: “And you have a nice day.”

American life in the spring of 2009 is full of hope, peril, and then this: the cancer at the core of our democracy.

In a month of violence gruesome even by our own standards, 57 people have lost their lives in eight mass shootings. The killing grounds include a nursing home, a center for new immigrants, a child’s bedroom. Before that it was a church, a college, a daycare center.

We hear about these sketches of carnage between market updates and basketball scores — and shrug. We’re the frogs slow-boiling in the pot, taking it all in incrementally until we can’t feel a thing. We shrug because that’s the deal, right? That’s the pact we made, the price of Amendment number two to the Constitution, right after freedom of speech.

As a Westerner, I’m sensitive to the argument that when politicians reflexively move to ban guns every after a high-profile slaughter, they often target law-abiding gun owners. Guns in the West are heritage, “a sacred part of being a Montanan and something that we will always fight to protect,” as Senators Jon Tester and Max Baucus, both Democrats from the Big Sky state, wrote in a recent letter to the Justice Department.

But as someone who lost a nephew to gun violence, I can only take these arguments so far. They are not abstractions, one side versus the other. I can’t help seeing faces, parents who no longer have a child to hold, hearts broken, lives destroyed when I hear bam, bam, bam.

A mother and her little girl, gunned down along with eight others in Samson, Ala., last month, were buried in each other’s arms — the still life of that second amendment.

In the aftermath of one of these atrocities, nothing is more chilling than a gun advocate racing before a camera to embrace a lunatic’s right to carry and kill.

If it was peanut butter or pistachio nuts taking down people by the dozens every week, we’d be all over it. Witness the recent recalls. But Glocks and AKs — can’t touch ‘em. So we’re awash in guns: 280 million.

Live with it, gun owners say, and if our murder rate is three times that of the United Kingdom and Canada, five times that of Germany, that’s the deal. The price. For consolation, I guess, there is the fact that the homicide rate has been flat for some time, down from the highs of the 1980s. Still, nearly 17,000 Americans are murdered each year — about 70 percent by guns — and 594,276 lost their lives betweens 1976 and 2005.

The recent twists involve Mexican drug cartels, who get their firepower from American retailers, and the mass killings this spring by shooters who appear to have acquired their weapons legally. Assault rifles figured prominently in the murders of seven police officers.

The Pittsburgh shooter picked up his AK-47 through an online company that passed the sale through to a licensed firearms dealer, as required. He was apparently legal for these guns despite the fact that he’d been booted from the Marines for assaulting his drill sergeant and had a restraining order from his ex-girlfriend.

All a citizen can do is ask for some common sense around the Second Amendment. The assault weapons ban, outlawing 19 military style guns that no hunter with sense of fair play would ever use, should be reinstated. President Bush and Congress let it expire in 2004, even though it was a godsend for police officers and supported by a majority of gun owners.

To the senators who back assault rifles while speaking of the “sacred part of being a Montanan,” you don’t want this kind of heritage. It demeans you as Westerners to allow easy access to weapons that kill innocents, and it does a disservice to history.

Heritage? Old West towns like Dodge City had strict gun control, making people check their weapons at the city doorstep.

And the gun dealers, they should be hammered for selling to drug cartels or through loopholes to convicts. Throw federal racketeering laws at them. Make it as hard for a wife-beater or a felon to get an AK as it is to get a driver’s license.

The rest of us can only mourn and shrug, marking grim anniversaries: Virginia Tech, Columbine, and on, and on, and on. ♥

[Timothy Egan writes "Outposts," a column at the NY Fishwrap online. Egan — winner of both a Pulitzer Prize in 2001 as a member of a team of reporters who wrote the series "How Race Is Lived in America" and a National Book Award (The Worst Hard Time in 2006) — graduated from the University of Washington with a degree in journalism, and was awarded an honorary doctorate of humane letters by Whitman College in 2000 for his environmental writings. Egan is the author of four other books, in addition to The Worst Hard TimeThe Good Rain: Across Time and Terrain in the Pacific Northwest, Lasso the Wind: Away to the New West, Breaking Blue, and The Winemaker's Daughter.]

Copyright © 2009 The New York Times Company

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