Category: The Other Day

Ron Paul lost the 2008 nomination for your sins

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Last week, President Barack Obama scheduled a speech before a joint session of Congress on a new jobs plan (I guess because there aren’t any more new jobs anywhere), and it happened to coincide with the next GOP debate.

When Speaker of the House John Boehner told him that wouldn’t work out, Obama said, “Oh, that’s fine, we can do it the next day,” which in both the attempt and subsequent acquiescence sort of tells you everything you need to know about how this presidency is going. Now Obama gets to speak opposite Green Bay and New Orleans in the NFL opener instead of a collection of cheeseheads and nominal saints.

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The ‘Look Up’ app will make someone a lot of money

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Everyone has at least one good idea in them that could make them very rich, or at least we’d all like to believe so.

For about two years now, I’ve had an idea for a smartphone app that I’ve thought would make me fabulously wealthy if I could ever get the technical know-how to do it, or at least doggedly pursue someone who could.

Alas. Much time has passed, and I’m pretty sure nothing will ever come of this gloriously brilliant thing creeping around inside my brain, so the next best thing is to sort of pretend to gloat about how clever I am, while ultimately being disheartened as I am again thwarted.

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There’s still plenty of summer left, don’t worry

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Today is unofficially the end of summer, although really Saturday was because, well, there’s no time left to recover from anything you could do in the time you’ve got left.

For several thousand kids and teachers It Begins, and the marathon of the school year that seems like it just ended the other day starts up again, ready or not. The butterflies are already colonizing your stomach at the thought.

But it’s OK. Labor Day is just around the corner, and the weekends come remarkably fast when you aren’t looking for them, quick as the boiling of an unwatched pot.

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Oh gosh, those poor little prairie dogs

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West Texas is not generally known as a bastion for PETA, although you wouldn’t be able to tell that based on the reaction to the recent rash of animal-related crimes and distasteful happenings.

When an emu gets strangled, we are quite upset. And if a rancher lets 300 horses nearly expire in a Presidio County stockyard, that offends us. Pet cats getting dismembered horrifies us, a dog getting shot with a crossbow drives us near into a blind rage.

And then the city of Odessa goes out and slaughters wholesale a prairie dog colony, and everyone is about ready to just go nuts and burn down city hall.

It really doesn’t make a whole lot of sense, though, does it?

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‘The last Metroid is in captivity; the galaxy is at peace’

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The other day (Saturday), marked the 25th anniversary of something very special: the release of Metroid, a science-fiction action-exploration video game for the original Nintendo console.

I could talk to you about how important this was, what the gameplay and music did that was so innovative and all that, but do you really care? No, you don’t really care. And anyway, I didn’t play it when it first came out. Metroid was only available in Japan, and around that time, I was mostly focused on trying to become an embryo.

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Also, he was 21 going to school with seventh graders

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The other day, Jerry Joseph shocked the world outside of Odessa by stepping into district court and admitting he was in fact, Guerdwich Montimer, Permian impostor, basketball cheat, national fraud, sex offender.

While the rest of the country was surprised the 23-year-old, suddenly and with no backsliding allowed, admitted he’d spent the last two-plus years pretending to be a nice, hardworking, churchgoing Haitian orphan born in 1994, Odessa was not so shocked. At this point, who cared anymore?

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And Jim Morrison said, ‘Welcome to the club’

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Amy Winehouse, the 27-year-old British singer-songwriter, died Saturday.

It’s a good age for it, and automatically grants her provisional membership to the 27 Club, of which Jim Morrison, Jimmy Hendrix, Janis Joplin and Rolling Stones guitarist Brian Jones are established members, having all died at that age between 1969 and 1971.

Retroactively, the legendary blues singer and guitarist Robert Johnson got added in, then Kurt Cobain of the ’90s grunge band Nirvana made it, yet another popular and talented artist cut down in his prime by his own self-destructive behavior.

Whether she’ll get the full membership, who knows? In 10 years, people may look back on her as just a fairly talented person who had two albums, one of them really fantastic, before squandering it all in drink, drug and crazy.

But of course that isn’t the way things work.

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In Luke Bryan’s immortal words, rain is a good thing

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It’s cliche, and the title of a song by ’80s glam metal band Cinderella, to say you don’t know what you got till it’s gone. Even in the desert, we never realized how accustomed to getting rain we were, until it stopped coming.

That’s why Tuesday was so astounding, wasn’t it? How familiar all the signs of rain were, but how foreign.

It starts when someone walks outside and says, “It looks like it could rain today.”

And you don’t really believe them, but you want to, and any excuse to step outside is a good one.

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‘Where were you when the Casey Anthony verdict came down?’

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I wonder if one day that’s a question that will seriously be asked.

This was, apparently, a pretty big deal, although I wasn’t really aware of just how much people cared about Casey Anthony till it was nearly over, and I saw people in the office crowd around a TV in mid-afternoon to find out whether the person everyone was looking to be guilty of murder would be found such by the jury.

Alas.

I have said, and will continue to say, that if Caylee Anthony had been Latoya Anthony or Caylee Gonzales, people wouldn’t have cared as much about the death of a not-yet-3-year-old girl in 2008. Some will debate that with me, but it seems indisputable that people only really cared about the mother Casey Anthony because she was smoking hot (and continues to be).

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It’s a good night because I can see out the window

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The other day someone told me that locusts (like the kind you read about in the Bible, not the humming cicada kind) are just grasshoppers, except that when they get together in big numbers, they start to frolic and swarm, and the suddenly there’s many billions of them eating their own weight in a day, in clouds many miles long.

I was frightened, but he said not to worry. All the locusts in this part of the world died off for some reason. And I felt better.

A year or three ago, I was in Grandfalls on the way back from some place, and stopped at the Allsups there for fuel.

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