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Brisketexan

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Everything posted by Brisketexan

  1. Yeah, I was a Houston kid. The brutality of the oil patch in the 80s very much hit close to home there as well. It really was felt Texas-wide, and Texasville very much struck a cord. I grew up in a family with deep ties to the oil patch, and in a city with an economy and well-being closely tied to the industry, so saw the pain, lost classmates, things got lean, all that. No rapture stuff, though...I was a Catholic school kid.
  2. I remember reading Larry McMurtry's Texasville, set in the oilpatch in a time of depressed oil prices, and thus a lot of depressed people in the oil patch: "In this arresting, funny-sad sequel to The Last Picture Show, McMurtry's small Texas town of Thalia has gone from boom to bust practically overnight, a victim of the mid-'80s oil glut. Under the strain of financial calamity, the townsfolk are becoming increasingly irrational -- one man dreams of bombing OPEC, the mayor is going quietly mad, sexual mores are turning bizarre, and the civic leaders are pressing on with a centennial celebration even though there's nothing to celebrate."
  3. "You can always count on Americans to do the right thing - after they've tried everything else." -Winston Churchill
  4. He asks a question "why are we doing this" (meaning being completely divisive and hate-filled and such)? Answer: (and this is a really depressing answer, but it's unavoidable) Because this is who we are, and this is what we want. "We the People" are not fed, at all, by anything that smells of "the common good" these days. Instead, we are fed entirely by fomented hatred and demonization of the other. We aren't happy unless someone else is having pain inflicted upon them. That's the only way you know that your version of society is working: you see the people you don't like being hurt. We are fed and driven entirely by negative inputs, not positive inputs. We still hunger for those somewhere inside us -- it's why cat videos and such are popular. But we are now so conditioned to the contrary that there's no f'n chance. The worm does not and will not turn until things get much, much worse, and at long last, we break. But man, the amount of suffering it's going to take to get there....ouch. Which leaves some of us in a really shitty place. As a first principle, we don't want ANYONE, ANY member of society to suffer/get burned. FFS, some of us have been waving our arms about it for better than a decade. Yet, we've been shown a mile-high stack of plain evidence that the only thing that has any possibility of changing our path is if the suffering becomes too great to bear or accept.....bottom line, we have to get burned. So we're sitting here simultaneously saying "don't touch the hot stove," but also thinking "okay, go ahead and touch it, the pain will teach you that burns are bad when nothing else seems to be able to."
  5. I wish you were wrong. But you're not.
  6. Nope. Hell, coulda been the crappy conference room salad and sandwich I had in the afternoon. It was a shitty food day, ate every meal at my desk.
  7. You laugh, but because of that episode I learned that Albania: - borders on the Adriatic - its land is mostly mountainous - and its chief export is chrome Who says TV isn't educational?
  8. And....we had to fight the bloodiest war in hour history to get to that resolution. And then afterwards, we built monuments to the people who fought brutally to maintain the institution of slavery (and yes, that's why they were fighting, read each state's declaration of secession which fucking SAYS that was the reason). And now, Charlie's team is fighting like hell to keep those monuments to the people who fought to maintain slavery UP AND IN THE PUBLIC SQUARE. For being someone so proud that we abolished slavery....they sure fight hard to venerate the treasonous bastards in our country who killed hundreds of thousands of Americans trying to KEEP slavery.
  9. I mean, is that maybe insensitive and such? Yeah. Is it also kinda funny? If you've ever watched/been to any city council meetings anywhere....yes, it's a bit funny. Among the real-deal citizen comments, there are often shenanigans, unserious people, etc. For the most part, city councils handle them well -- the dude who shows up at every council meeting to offer public comment on how the lizard people are here and tainting our drinking water, etc. -- they treat him politely, thank him for his comments. But it is a tough part of the job, separating the wheat from the chaff at citizen comment time.
  10. I mean....he posts on Surly....so.....
  11. "If English was good enough for Jesus Christ, it's good enough for me!"
  12. ABC affiliate here is a Tegna station, not Nexstar (although they will be merging soon, thanks to sucking up to the FCC by taking Jimmy off the air).
  13. Christianity is Surlyhorns? Surlyhorns is Christianity? Things are starting to make sense.
  14. Austin-area rain is more like this:
  15. And if the shooter uses a .50 cal, I presume the casings will say "NowThis."
  16. Hell, don't sleep on Jamaican meat pies/patties. We didn't eat here, but it was across the alley from a spot where we were having coffee near Seven Dials, so I took a pic of the menu.
  17. Wouldn't do me much good. She's got a pretty good repertoire herself. I mean, she's actually a member of a group called "Ministers who say 'fuck.'"
  18. I think you can just send them in to Things Remembered, and they'll do custom engraving for you.
  19. So, the current story is that a guy with an anti-ICE motive.....shot and killed innocent detainees. Do we live in a world where it's all bullshit? Where any would-be assassins are mostly completely terrible shots? Where nutbars purposefully give mixed messages for unknown reasons? Where nothing makes any fucking sense? All of the above? Everything is fucky, everything is shitty. That's what I'm going with until we get some contrary evidence.
  20. Also accurate. Although I dunno about how well it woulda worked out if Jesus was a China man. I mean, he'd have done all that profound stuff at the Last Supper, and then had to do it all over again a coupla hours later cuz he was hungry again.
  21. But it's gotta be to Christian Nationalist Jesus, and it has to be totally hollow and not followed by any meaningful action, for it to really count.
  22. Let's get this obvious outcome out there: If the shooter today had ANY involvement with, statements about, etc., that could POSSIBLY be used to paint him as a "leftist," those will be disseminated to the usual sources and amplified like a motherfucker. If the shooter was out to kill illegal invaders, and left a detailed note saying "I was trying to save America by killing dirty invaders," we won't ever hear about it. It will be buried deeper than Trump's dick in a 13 year old girl at an Epstein party.
  23. FUCK YES. Man, I loved old-school Timmy Chan's when I was a kid. That was a real family treat every now and then.
  24. Goddamn this getting old shit. I had the last two slices of Conan Savage for dinner last night (cold, wolfed down at my desk before I had to pop on to one of my two evening meetings that kept me working till 10:30). Then, at 3:00 a.m., woke up doubled over with cramps, and went and did volcanic and offensive stuff to my toilet that I'll probably have to apologize to it for later. Did that twice. Are you telling me that I can't eat thick crust cold jalapeno-loaded pizza at my desk for dinner anymore? Because F that.
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