Well, my fellow Texas, what have we learned from this disastrous week just passed? Quite a lot, actually – and many of us were reminded anew of those old habits acquired from having lived for a few years in places where winters are reliably ice-cold frozen, dark, snow-packed and last for months. The Army retiree ahead of us in the line to get into the grocery store on Wednesday reminisced with the Daughter Unit and I about such winters spent in less temperate climes, and we racked our collective memories about what had happened to the ice scrapers that we all were certain we had come to Texas with at least two decades ago. (I was sure that mine was somewhere in the trunk of the Very Elderly Volvo, which was sold ten years ago. Possibly the young motorhead who bought the VEV discovered the ice scraper – well, at least now he knows what it was for.)
Texas
A Diversion: Famous For the Wrong Reason
We read this with much amusement earlier in the week in the Daily Mail– the lamentations of one Brett Alder, a California sales exec who moved his family to Austin apparently in haste and with minimal to non-existent prior research on his new home, who repented at leisure after a brief year and afterwards (upon moving back to California) expanded on woes and the general shortcomings of Texas in an editorial in Business Insider. The original column is behind a paywall, so unavailable to me, but the Daily Mail posted the list of his lamentations. This brought about considerable hilarity in the comments on the various articles which repeated the story, among Texans. The Daughter Unit and I found the article most particularly amusing – especially me; California born and bred, lived there without interruption (save two trips to Europe) until I joined the military, where for twenty years I moved frequently to new communities and wasted little time or heartburn on making a new home. I’ve lived in Texas since 1995 now, with occasional trips to the formerly-Golden State, the last one in 2010 when Dad passed away and I spent a couple of weeks helping Mom sort out things.
To continue with a fisking of Brett-the-male-Karen’s lamentations on life in Austin:
“Collecting Democrat votes one dead stiff at a time”
Yesterday at lunch a friend was circulating an e-mail her friend had taken as she’d run errands in Houston. Great video: hearse following Biden bus. Some overreaction (Can we stand four years with a humorless party in power? And how do they intend to use their power – to stop laughter and flags flying?)
I’ve long thought that the Babylon Bee does more to keep up spirits about next Tuesday than the greatest stump speech or endorsement.
Iconoclast
I had in mind the deliberate destruction of religious icons, and a vague memory of it having happened at least once in the Russian or Eastern Orthodox church in the medieval period; such things being, in the judgment of the sternly orthodox, ungodly and unsuitable, and therefore to be expunged … but it seems that spasms of righteous destruction are almost a human constant, across culture and time. The current passion for defacing and destroying public monuments – and not just those memorializing Confederate heroes – turns out to be not all that new and revolutionary. (channeling Private Gomer Pyle: Surprise, surprise, surprise.)
Sunday at the Civil War
Last weekend, at the folklore event at the Museum of Texas Handmade Furniture, I was talking to one of the other participants – yes, there were a good few 19th-century reenactors there, all in costume – and mentioned that I wanted to get some good pictures of Civil War reenactors; some images that might be worked into creating the cover for the next book. I had been thinking of a combat scene, with an artistic effect to make it look rather like one of those Currier and Ives Civil War battle prints … only without the need of paying a bomb for the rights. The reenactor – who was performing as a snake-oil medicine show entrepreneur, looked at me and recommended the Civil War weekend at the Liendo Plantation – a blip on the map of eastern Texas some forty miles short of Houston. It was, he said, one of the biggest and best-attended Civil War reenactor events in Texas, with artillery and cavalry and all, on the grounds of a lovely and historic old plantation house … and it would be the very next weekend. A weekend where we had nothing really planned. I went home, looked it up, plotted out the drive … and said; let’s do it.