Look! Over on the right! My first PHP hack! And the great thing is, I don’t even know what the hell is generating the station name. So, really, all I did was adjust some formatting for this neato plug-in.

Yes, indeed…it’s come to this: I’m a test-bed for Herself’s Tiny Bidness. The cool thing is that this jukebox setup has some really good Texas stuff on it, like the Wendells and Kevin Deal that NEVER gets played anymore…now it’s all Bob Schneider and emu bands. You’ll notice, too, that the MP3 tags are a little hit-or-miss…I’ve been begging her to clean up that library for WEEKS.

The Master of Sparks, stealing a page from the TFG/TG playbook*, is going out live over the interweb tomorrow for the first time that I’m aware of. I like to think of The Master my younger, drunker, more idealistic, scary hell-raising brother. He would probably hate that characterization, but there you go. Point being, though, you should listen in, as Jack will almost definitely be playing something worthy of your attention. Crikey, the man’s basically an ice-fishing Texan. The thing to fear is another idolization of the latest literary suicide I’m not mentioning anymore.

I seriously can’t wait for this. Should be loads of fun.

* Never mind that Jack has had the radio show going for a few decades now, where people pay him to do his stuff. We’re just getting started down the “paying” track.

PS I’ll be in Minnehopeless on Monday night if there’s a good show or poker game going on. Drop me a line, kiddies…Buck is always up for la musica or die karte, long as they don’t start too late.

…but I can’t resist.

Leave a comment if you do get it. After all, Comments are always free here at TFG!™

The triumphant return of The Choppin’ Dude.

He’s such a frenetic, hard-working little bastard…

I want some web-hippy genius to tell me why this
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is better than this
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besides being coolio new stuff…

Sometimes I hate nerds.

Note to Self: WPBT in Vegas; first weekend in June; Aladdin.

Note to Wife: I’m intending for you to go. Put it on whatever you use for a planner — 4 days, 3 nights, 6/2-5. Nah — make it 6/2-6…don’t want to fight the crowds at McCarran.

Note to Halverson: should we use your regular suite at the Bellagio, or slum it elsewhere?

Count how many totally fucked-up things are in this Thompson article. Decide which is the worst one. For me, it’s the idea of blowing off the top of your skull with your 6 year-old grandson in the next room. I can understand not wanting to be a burden on your family or being forced to spend time in a hospital bed with a bunch of tubes and machines keeping you alive…but God Almighty. Take a fucking long walk out in the woods by yourself, you selfish bastard.

OK, then — end of the Hunter Thompson crap in these parts. Anyone memorializing this mook needs to do some long, hard thinking. Especially Thomas Wolfe.

Thanks to Kevin, I now have external confirmation that Bill Parcells is nothing but a sham:

Secondly, Parcells already has significantly improved his financial situation. He lost quite a bit in his ‘02 divorce from his ex-wife Judy (including an undisclosed monetary settlement and two homes), but the four-year, $17.1 million deal he signed with Dallas has surely eased that pain.

Today’s signing of Drew Bledsoe is further proof that The Magnificent Tuna a) did nothing more than hit the playoff two-outer in 2003, and b) is running a retirement compensation package for all of his ex-players here in Dallas with Jerry Jones’ payroll.

The shocker in this to me is Jones’ rolling over and sticking his puppy feet in the air for Billy Bob. Love him or hate him (and most of the time, I’ve hated him), you can’t not admire Jerry’s business acumen. Somehow, though, for some reason, he’s letting this farce continue. He’s allowing Billy Bob to bench Drew Henson for yet another year so that we can run another immobile, over-the-hill, ex-salad-days Parcell pal out there on the field. “Fuck the future, here’s the mid-90s model QB for America’s Team.” Why would Jerry Jones allow that to happen AGAIN? He has got to realize that he is utterly destroying his fan base, his customers, his bread & butter.

Let me put it this way: in the deepest, darkest days of 1-15 with Cowboy Tom Landry getting fired by the head Arkansas A-Hole “Pick of the Litter, Jocks-n-Socks” Jones, I never felt the despair that I feel today with The Brobdingnagian Tuna at the helm of my beloved Pokes. I truly believe the guy’s looking to clear a few more bucks, and he doesn’t give a damn about his legacy. Crikey — he’s a New Yorker…coached the Giants & the Jets. Coached New England. If I was a lunatic, I’d say it’s all a big East Coast conspiracy. Why would he care what happens down here in Tejas after he leaves? Hell, he’ll probably go back to Brooklyn or Queens and gloat.

Go give Proty-Dub some money. The man has broken two laptops in 1 year ( I suspect baby drool.) Now he’s forced into using a borrowed Macintosh.

Jeffro is one of the very few original TFG blogroll members, kind of an O.B. in my world (and that’s the one that counts, babies.) I maintained a link to him for about 15 years while he was off on sabbatical, hiking the Andes, making babies, gaining tenure and not updating. Since his return, he’s been a blogging berserker, keeping up the Funny and at a very high level.

One question I have, though: is it rude to ask for a laptop when desktops are so damn cheap? Answer: Probably, but I’m not Jeff Goldstein.

Soooooooooo…can I take off the HST black armband yet?

I’m still amazed at the number of people, including Tom Wolfe*, who are whipsawed into despair upon learning of the man’s suicide. Is it because I’m old and read his work a million decades ago, and hence, no longer find it to be so invigorating?

I think it is a generational thing. Oh, well — I never learned the Charleston and I can’t bust a rhyme, either. Cest la vie, say the old folks.

By the by — what would yall say to an hour a week of TFG Radio? I’m thinking of pirating my own pirate station to play some decent music…both kinds…Country and Western. I love my wife, but her taste is rather suspect by my lights. She does good work, but there were musics recorded prior to 2002.

* It’s somewhere in the WSJ, but I’ll be damned if I can find it. It was as good an obituary as a man could ask for.

Good post at Phil Carter’s Intel Dump that describes the ad-hoc formation of some Iraqis into military units who are out killing bad guys:

The unplanned units — commanded by friends and relatives of cabinet officers and tribal sheiks — go by names like the Defenders of Baghdad, the Special Police Commandos, the Defenders of Khadamiya and the Amarah Brigade. The new units generally have the backing of the Iraqi government and receive government funding.

Mr. Carter equates them to the Afghan warlord, like the Northern Alliance. Being who I am, I tend to think of them as modern-day Texas Rangers, a model that achieved a fair amount of success on a rugged and ragged frontier. And really, on hearing about this, I have more faith than ever that Iraq is going to do just fine as a democracy, and an American ally. Not that it’s any kind of surprise to me, really, but I have been waiting to hear about people taking matters into their own hands. I suppose you wouldn’t be shocked to find that it was the Wall St. Journal that has the original story. heh heh

This being 2005, though, they call these irregular units “pop-ups”. Yeesh…let’s scrub that ASAP, please, and allow them some dignity.

I guess you could say that the moving of the hosts, the changing of the software, the upgrading of the changed software, the earthworks required to defend a blog from spam, and the pending quite-necessary upgrade to the blog software for Herself has really, perhaps finally, soured me on blogging as a hobby.

In other hobby news, I have played damn little poker over the last month. One night with the lawyers, basically, where I was doubled up and lost half of it on the last hand I played. I called an all-in with four to the nut diamond flush. I got a red card, but it weren’t the right shape. Yes, $98 bucks on the turn of one card. Young Iggy tells me he thinks I’m a Big Bet pokerer. This proves that to be true. It also proves I’m a Big Idiot pokerer. That game has gone from a breezy 50¢/$1 pot-limit game to a 1/2 no-limit game in the last couple of sessions, and The Frenchman wants to bring in more high-rollers…that’s putting a squeeze on me. Unfortunately, given the current passion of bored policeman and over-zealous political pricks for busting up card games in Texas, The Frenchman wants to do do away with our professional dealer, in order to protect himself and the other prosecutors and off-duty LEOs who play in the game. I’d rather they grow a pair of balls and go tell Bill Hill that he’d be wasting his time, the judges’ time, and the juries’ time, by kowtowing to elected morons who want to prosecute card players. Fat chance of that, though, since it makes for such lovely headlines, after all.

In other hobby news, the TexasGigs Radio is going strong, with two shows this week. The Duchess is sloooooooooooooooowly getting the hang of the mixing board and all the connections to the laptop and all the software that runs it. It’s not an easy thing to master, let me tell you. All you A/V nerds, shut up.

In other bidness news, camping season opens in two weekends. Joy. I’m so tired from working all the other stuff, but this is real money and a real business, so I’m gonna have to rustle up some energy from some where for the weekends. I’m already offloading a lot of the manual labor to the hired hands, but dammitt, I really miss driving my damn tractor.

In the big topic of the blogosphere news, Hunter S. Thompson offed himself. Sorry to see him go, I guess, but by 2005, the guy was living off the good graces of a bunch of Gen-Xers who thought he hung the moon. I liked his work, for the most part, but all the gonzo dope talk wears thin if you’re not doping it up yourself. At least it did for me…YMMV. Of course, it’s easy to argue the man was the father of all blogs — as a self-referential, self-loving, self-hating, self-centered buffoon, this post stands in testimony to his influence on all of us. So, you know — go get a peacock or something.

OK, the upgrade isn’t going quite so damn well, I guess. I’m going to leave this default thing up for a while. Who knows, it might grow on you.

THEMEY UPDATE: Well, it wasn’t that hard. Just a new way of doing business. I’m definitely a conservative, though — I hate change. Now I need to make these letters bigger…my old eyes can’t see ‘em so good.

This bad: with no hockey on, my sports jones is forcing me to watch NASCAR.

And regarding hockey, I am hurting something fierce. And I think I can safely that when you cancel an entire season, you can no longer be considered a major sport. That’s sad, but it’s completely self-inflicted according to all the experts. Oh, well…is it too late to get a CHL or AHL team? Put ‘em back in the stock barn out at Fair Park? Get that old smoky Zamboni tuned up? Please? For The Children? So the terrorists don’t win?

Saw this little bit in the FrontBurner…

Whether you’re for it or against it (and I’m firmly on the fence), the closing of the Houston Hyatt does not bode well for a Dallas convention hotel, especially since convention hotel room nights in Dallas already fell 52 percent from 1999 to 2003. There’s been a nationwide drop of 16 percent in convention business for the entire country during the same period. Conventions are now a declining industry.

I don’t know the first freaking thing about the Houston Hyatt (thereby revealing why I’m not sure it’s important to the D Magazine dudes, but you knew that), but — 52% is 36% from 16%. By my math, that’s more than TRIPLE the national average. Did you get that? TRIPLE!

Why would Dallas be TRIPLE the national average? Call me a fool, but I suspect it might have to do with a frustrated Mommy in the Mayor’s Office, who has banned late-night dancing, public smoking, and lap dances at strip clubs and who, if the grapevine is right (and it usually is), is now coming after “vice”, for which you can read whores and poker, for her strong-mayor push in the next city election. Once upon a time, this used to be a really fun, wide-open town where adults (particularly out-of-town adults) could have a rocking good time. Now it’s an uptight bunch of pricks who think another Italian purse store or French dress store or Noo Yawk god-knows-what store will keep bringing the dentists and insurance guys to town. Face it, Laura — you’ve made the town safe for your hausfrau friends from Oak Cliff and Uptown and HP at the expense of the wahoo out-of-towners. Good trade? I dunno — but in the meantime, can you ask the ladies who lunch to pick up the slack on the freaking handbags?

And — trust me on this one — storm-window professionals from Montana don’t give two shits about bridges over Ol’ Stinky designed by a Spaniard’s interns. Only Highland Parkers with their fortunes already banked care about that kind of foofaraw. Because those stupid bridges are the only thing an average Dallasite will ever see from the Trinity River Boondoggle.

One more note: Conventions are a declining industry, Wick, becuase good convention cities are hard to come by these days. There’s Las Vegas, and there’s New Orleans, and there’s…what? Nothing, that’s what. Every other place in America is a bunch of guilt-ridden boomers trying to get rid of reminders of their wastrel younger years. Idiots.