This is a crying damn shame. Uglesich’s is closing up in two days. It was on my calendar for at least two meals this damn month, May 16, only 10 days away. Crap. Just crap. Just dang crap all to hell and back.

Read the whole story, man. We should all be there bright and early tomorrow morning waiting in line. That’s food that we’ll never, ever see again. Durn, that makes me sad. Oh, Lord…I’m tearing up just thinking about it being closed, and I’ve only ever been once. There were things on that menu I have been planning to stuff down my gullet for over a year. And now I won’t get to. I don’t know how this would work out, but I hope Mr. Uglesich sells his recipe box to a Good Person. Maybe drop by for a consultation a couple times a week…keep his hand in, so to speak. That would work, if you’ve got the right buyer.

From Miss Janet, who will now never know what she missed. Hell, I won’t know what I missed. You know, life is just too damn short, so grab all the gusto you can when you can. It might be gone next time. Crap.

I can’t believe anyone would spend a nickel on a stainless-steel welded-down beer can that you have to wash. If you’re not of the temperament to drink beer out of a can…don’t yall have big tubs of ice with singles near the front door of your local beer emporium? Be a scientist, even…buy a couple of different beers and record your observations about which one makes the yardbird taste better. Publish them on the internets.

I also think an important element is getting lost here, like it always does when you’re dealing with people who have more money than sense. Yardbird is poor folks food…poor folks drink low-brow beer out of a can…the whole point is to get cheap laughs out of the chicken with a beer can up it’s butt, and a cheap drunk while you sit on the porch and make sure the temperature in the smoker stays right. And a good, tasty, juicy yardbird for dinner.

Not to say that you CAN’T tart it up with a bunch of pointless gear, if you’re of a mind to. The French have convinced lots of people you need a copper-bottom pan to make gravy.

I tried once again this weekend in between customers to get my disorganized act cleaned up a little bit and start using RSS for blog reading. Total failure, of course, even when I narrowed it down to my Absolute Must-Have Daily Reads. Hit or miss on whether RSS is even there, hit or miss on whether it’s a five-word excerpt, 20-word excerpt, or the full text of the entry. Full text is the most lightly used since everyone wants the hits. Excerpts are useless, in my estimation…I read blogs because I want to read blog writers…if I wanted to skim things, I’d buy the crappy snoozepaper for 50¢. And I’ll tell you right now — I already skim your blogs — I’ve got a scroll button…making me click on every stupid entry is, shall we say, a disincentive (there’s one guy on my blogroll who can get away with that Click for More business). Even my own RSS was set to excerpt but I’ve remedied that, since if you’re a web hippy and that’s what you want, you should get it. I’m through caring about hits, but then I’m not selling anything like a book or a magazine article or an internets radio show or teevee appearances. Not even t-shirts with big-booby chick models.* And I don’t work for Nick Denton or Jason Calcanis. So I deleted all my Bloglines subscriptions again for about the hundredth time of making the dumb thing work like I want it to.

An-t-way — thought that might interest you. Probably not. Just wanted to point out how pointless it is for the average, fairly geeky, bear. I shudder to think about my wife or my daughter or my brother or my pal Otis might think about all the horse-poop that seems to pile up around the vanity web site of the moment.

Now, if someone has a reader that I can feed an OPML list that will go get the whole enchilada for me since the last time I looked, and it’s a standalone WinXP program that runs in the background, I’m all ears. Even one that runs 24 hours a day on Linux that is surfable from anywhere would work for me. I’m not picky.

* I’m open to all offers, of course. I am a red-blooded capitalist. Especially if I can be the art director for the photo shoot.

I wandered over to super-Democrat Chuck Kuffner for a morning dose of generalized liberal outrage, and found this Willy Nelson Highway post. Couldn’t care less about that waste of legislative time*, but I did find this link to Chapter 225 of the Texas Transportation Code, which outlines the how a highway gets those goofy names and which ones have them. My favorites, in no particular order:

• NOLAN RYAN EXPRESSWAY (totally my favorite; too bad it’s in Houston)
• THE BISHOP ERNEST T. DIXON, JR., MEMORIAL (that just sounds Bible-Belt crazy)
• ATLAS ICBM HIGHWAY (so very cool)
• PHANTOM WARRIORS HIGHWAY (I do NOT want to break down here)
• QUEEN ISABELLA MEMORIAL BRIDGE (A Queen? Seriously? In Texas? We need to talk about this one.)

I can imagine the filling station convo: “Well, you slide down 351, hang a left on Atlas ICBM, go for three or four minutes, start looking for the big ol’ oak tree on the left, and the next gate after that is his.”

* Like I told those boys, there’s a list a mile long that we need to honor before we get to Willie Nelson. My personal choice, if we’re going to start with the Outlaws, is Waylon Jennings. My personal choice, if we’re going to start with genuine Texas Giant musicians, would be the great Buddy Holly. In fact, those idiots should just be impeached for even bringing up Willie Nelson to start with…that’s a suck-up attention-getting maneuver from the get-go.

(Hey, I got through that without mentioning Austin potheads!)