In your daily life, is there anything that hurts as much as getting your Qs full cracked by Ks full on the damn river? I love poker but that will make me shut down quicker than you can say boo.

Well, I’ve had my share of suckout wins, but that was one masterfully played hand, and to have that two-outer hit you twixt the eyebrows is just demoralizing.

So, to pick myself up, I downloaded the latest Thrift Store Cowboys album from Amazon. It’s a departure from their earlier stuff, but not too far off the mark. In The Clear solidifies the whole thing from the standpoint of the old fat guy who used to own that place where they played in August a long time ago. In other words, go get it. They’re one of my favorite bands for running flat-out down a blacktop under a full moon. Hell, get ‘em all.

Brian Micklethwait - Ed Smith on how baseball defeated cricket in America

The real answer is that baseball got a lucky bounce in the form of the Civil War. The pitch could be rougher and less equipment was needed, so bored soldiers found it easier to set up a baseball game than a cricket match. Baseball, for the first time, started to draw ahead.

WTF? I say, Whiskey-Tango-Foxtrot? Cricket looks to my un-expert eye to require less equipment…maybe he means the wickets and bales? That’s 5 sticks at each end. Hmph. Well, whatever. Read Brian’s excerpt for the real answer.

I say this with a bit of a heavy heart, as a baseball-playing, baseball-loving American Texan, who fell head over heels for cricket after precisely 10 (ten) minutes of exposure to the sport being played live — it’s silly for us to have rejected the sport.
WE. WOULD. RULE.

I thank our technological mavens for providing cricket as a search option on the DirecTV channel guide, because every now and again, I will find it, and settle in for a few hours of sport.

Hank III doing a Waylon number, and doing it damn proud.

Isn’t it time for a new album? A tour? Throw us a bone here, son.

Jack Ingram at Floore’s, James McMurtry at Gruene, or Alejandro Escovedo w/ Mary Cutrefuelo at Casbeers?

OK, I’ve seen AE/MC before (saw her close down Naomi’s, in fact), never seen the other two. Gruene is a more comfortable place to see a show, with only a couple of uniformed deputies keeping a close eye, but otherwise fading into the woodwork. Floore’s is beset with coppers like a plague of locusts, who I think are mainly there to look at the high-school kids serving beer, but who are also an oppressive presence with their sheer numbers.

Bottom line, I think I’d get a bigger kick out of Ingram’s guitar-slinging, but the SA (they hate that here) shows I’ve seen have always been unenthusiastic, by both players and listeners. On top of that, Jack is being feted by the Academy of Country Music and the Country Music Teevee set. Those Brylcreemed Nashville knobs give me the heebie-jeebies, and that song playing on his website sucks ass, and I mean Kenny Chesney a-s-s.

So, probably pothead McMurtry. Or poker here in the TFG Command Center. One of those. A short drive down Blanco to see Escovedo and Cutruefuelo wouldn’t be out of the question, since they tend to wrap up before midnight, and I need my beauty sleep. Really, really need that.

Bring Your Tractor to School Day - Sheboygan Press - Photo Gallery

Because firing seems to be what they do to people who do this, these days.

Obama: A Mustard and Relish Sandwich of a Speech @ AMERICAN DIGEST

I don’t know about you, but it seems to me that if you cut out either the mustard or the relish you could eat cheaper still.

It also seems to me that you have to be born bone ignorant in a pea patch to think that in this country at this time you have to subsist on such fare.

I love a big mean typical white person. It’s just so…typical.

Leave your answer in the comments. Pretty funny that makes it through the many layers of highly-trained journalists and editors in place at a distinguished establishment like the AP.

Via that Best of the Web email thingie I get…

Hank III on the stage at the GOO: