Word of the Day

Sam Houston - Mathew Brady, c. 1848–1850

Uxorious - Uxorious (/ʌkˈsɔːriəs/) describes a husband excessively fond of, doting upon, or submissively devoted to his wife. Often used with a negative connotation, it implies a man is foolishly submissive or "controlled". 

JMSmith uses it to describe General Sam Houston, hero of San Jacinto, in a post about baptism.

Love & Death - Netflix Series

Love & Death | Official Trailer | Warner Bros. Entertainment
Warner Bros. Entertainment

We only watched the first couple of episodes and then we had had enough of these people. I'm only posting this because I laid all the ground work when we started watching it and I'm cleaning out my drafts folder.

 

Love & Death is a 7-episode true-crime drama miniseries, now streaming on Netflix as of December 2025, that chronicles the 1980 killing of Betty Gore by Candy Montgomery in Texas. Starring Elizabeth Olsen and Jesse Plemons, the show follows a suburban affair that turns deadly, leading to a high-profile murder trial. - Google

Cast

Actor	Surname	Character	Surname	Role
Elizabeth	Olsen	Candy	Montgomery	Instigator
Jesse	Plemons	Allan	Gore	Candy's target
Lily	Rabe	Betty	Gore	Allan's wife
Patrick	Fugit	Pat	Montgomery	Candy's husband
Krysten	Ritter	Sherry	Cleckler	Candy's friend
Tom	Pelphrey	Don	Crowder	Candy's lawyer
Elizabeth	Marvel	Jackie	Ponder	Old pastor of the Methodist church
Keir	Gilchrist	Ron	Adams	New pastor

7 episodes, 55 minutes each.

Starfront Observatories

A telescope farm in Texas allows people to remotely capture the night sky
Rowan Cheung

Starfront Observatories. These guys seem to have their ducks all lined up. Very cool.

Starfront Observatories

P. S. I wonder what they could see if they all pointed their telescopes at the same place. Could all the images be combined into one with higher resolution? Jack wonders if any of these telescopes would be available for rent. Might be a business opportunity here. Also, I zoomed in on the Google satellite map and there was nothing to see. I suspect things don't change much in the middle of nowhere, so the satellite image probably hasn't been updated lately.

Starbase at Night

Starbase at night, with a SuperHeavy booster in transport along the curved road

Click to embiggenate. The Silicon Graybeard has the story.

Drill, Baby, Drill

Bullwinkle jacket, Corpus Christi, Texas, 1988

Jacket is the underwater structure that supports the drilling platform.

The Republic of Texas and The Naval Battle of Campeche

The Republic of Texas and The Naval Battle of Campeche
The History Guy: History Deserves to Be Remembered

I had never heard of the events he talks about, but they touch on things that I have heard about like Sam Houston, Santa Ana and the war with Mexico. It makes me realize how narrow my view of history is. And who knew that Mexico was once at the forefront of battleship technology?

Mexican 2-gun paddlewheel frigate Guadalupe

Sebastopol from the sea - sketched from the deck of H.M.S. Sidon. The men are operating a 68-pounder 88 cwt smoothbore muzzle-loading gun.

Budos Rising

Budos Band - Budos Rising Live in Austin
naggerbear

Recorded at the Mohawk in Austin, Texas. Usually I will listen to a tune several times before I post it, but this one hit me so hard I said it's going up now.

Mohawk in Austin, Texas

It looks like a dive, which means the music has got to be good. Tickets are cheap, too.

Middle of Nowhere

The BEST Place To Stop For Gas For Private Planes
Bill Allen

Dumas, Texas? Where's that? Middle of the Texas panhandle, 50 miles north of Amarillo:

Nashville to Las Vegas via Dumas, Texas

The Valero McKee Oil Refinery is seven miles northeast of Dumas. The land is so flat you can see the refinery from Dumas. The site looks about like you might expect:

Valero McKee Oil Refinery

The Center for Land Use Interpretation gives us a short summary:

This oil refinery, located on 5,000 acres near the Panhandle town of Sunray, is one of a few refineries in western Texas. It has a capacity of 200,000 barrels per day, making it medium-large relative to the others in the State. It employs around 450 people, and produces a wide range of petroleum products including gasoline, jet fuel, diesel, asphalt, sulfur, sulfuric acid, and liquefied petroleum gas (LPG). It is connected to a network of pipelines that bring crude oil from Kansas, Colorado, and Oklahoma, as well as from the Gulf, and the Permian Basin. Most of its products leave the plant via pipeline as well. It is likely the most widely connected of the dozen refineries owned by Valero in the USA. Valero, based in San Antonio, is one of the largest refiners in the country.

Looking for pictures of this place I found some cool images, so I uploaded them to Jigsaw Planet.

McKee Refinery 1

Houston Storm

Electricity transmission towers were damaged in Cypress, Texas, by a strong storm on Thursday, May 21, 2024 - Janett Avalos / Houston Public Media

I don't think I've ever heard of power transmission towers being taken down by a windstorm. Cypress is a suburb of Houston.

Via Bayou Renaissance Man

Longhorn Ballroom

Longhorn Ballroom

Paging through a bunch of memes on Non-Original Rants this morning and came across this non-sequitur. I spent some time in Texas (eight years maybe?) and while the state is thoroughly permeated with redneck culture, there is a lot of great music that comes out of there, music I like anyway.

Now I come across this sign and I'm thinking, yeah, let's wave a red flag in front of the bull. It'll be fun. 

Wikipedia has a page about this place. Here's some tidbits:

Originally built by O.L. Nelms, an eccentric Dallas millionaire, for his close friend, western swing bandleader Bob Wills, the venue opened in 1950 as Bob Wills' Ranch House. When Wills left In the early 50's Nelms leased the sprawling venue to notorious nightclub owner turned assassin Jack Ruby. Mr. Ruby eventually had a nervous breakdown and lost the lease, but he is credited with hosting some of the best black entertainers of the day including Count Basie, Ruth Brown, and Nat King Cole.

. . .

On January 10, 1978 it achieved brief infamy in international music circles when the Sex Pistols appeared there and during their performance taunted the audience, resulting in someone throwing a beer bottle and breaking Sid Vicious's nose, and he continued to play with blood running down his chest.

Remember Jack Ruby? He was the guy who shot Oswald, who shot JFK. 

Science of Salvation

Galveston after the fire of 8 June 1877

JMSmith starts with a quote:

“She called him ‘a half-hammered, kinky-headed, limber-legged, yaller negro who knew nothing about the science of salvation or the refined instincts that make up the cream of Christian piety.” - Galveston Daily News (Sep. 27, 1877)

and then fills in the story. Oh, Christian Brotherhood, how affable though art.

In 1877 Galveston may have had a population of 15,000. Wikipedia doesn't mention the fire.

Texas Dairy Farm Fire

Seems like there have been an awful lot of fires at food processing plants lately. I can't tell if there really has been a significant increase in the number of incidents or whether our communications channels have improved so much that we are hearing about them more often. Or maybe conspiracy theories sell, so more people are writing reports about these kind of incidents.

I suspect that food processing, like grocery stores, run on very thin margins, so some operators might be inclined to skimp on safety items like fire prevention. I mean, nobody's going to care very much if a bunch of animals get killed, they were all going to be killed anyway.

South Fork Dairy, Dimmitt, Texas

But this dairy farm fire that Bayou Renaissance Man reports on is pretty phenomenal: 18,000 dairy cattle killed in a barn fire. How can you get that many cattle in one barn? It must be pretty big barn. It is. Using Google Maps distance measuring feature I find that the barn is 800 feet by 2,400 feet. This thing is half a mile long and covers 44 acres.

South Fork Dairy - West Texas Farmland

What's even weirder (from my point of view) is that it is all by its lonesome in the midst of a huge expanse of agricultural fields. Dimmitt, Texas must be a very strange place.

18,000 cattle. Butchered you could get about 500 pounds of meat from each animal. At a half pound of meat per day, that would be enough to feed everyone in Dimmitt for a dozen years. Or enough to make 36 million quarter pounders.

Termination Shock - Notes Part 1

Notes on the book Termination Shock by Neal Stephenson. The book is set in the not-too-distant future.

Part 1 - Texas

Part 2

Princess of Orange
Possible future queen of Holland

The Queen of Holland flies into Waco, piloting an aging private jet.

Dassault Falcon 900EX

They have flown from Amsterdam, a distance of 5,000 miles. There are numerous business jets that could make the trip, the Dassault Falcon is just one. It's been in production since 1984, so an old one is entirely possible. The current Dutch Airforce One is a 737.

Noordeinde Palace

Noordeinde Palace is where the future queen will have her office.

Waco Texas airport, dam, and confluence of the North Bosque and Brazos Rivers

Texas has a real problem with feral hogs. Rufus has made is his mission in life to kill as many of them as possible. He hunts them at night using a rifle with a night vision scope. Rufus is a character in the book, but his technique is real.


107 Hogs Down | Hog Hunting with Thermal Night Vision in Texas | Zeus Pro 640
Ultimate Night Vision
Feral hogs get onto the runway at Waco. The plane runs into them just as it is touching down and crashes. Everyone survives, the plane doesn't catch on fire, but the hogs are a problem, and then Rufus shows up and saves the day.

When the Levee Breaks

Led Zeppelin When the Levee Breaks (music video)
Matthew Fuggi
I picked up a copy of Termination Shock by Neal Stephenson at Powell's yesterday. It opens with a few lines from the song When the Levee Breaks, which is as good an excuse as any to post Led Zeppelin's version of it.

When the Levee Breaks Lyrics

If it keeps on rainin', levee's goin' to break

If it keeps on rainin', levee's goin' to break

And the water gonnna come in and we'll have no place to stay

I works on the levee, mama, both night and day

I works on the levee, mama, both night and day

I works so hard, to keep the water away

- Kansas Joe McCoy & Memphis Minnie 

The song dates from 1929.

The first chapter is all about Texas and the feral hog and fire ant problems they have down there, not to mention the flooding in Houston every time it rains.

P.S. I've posted Zepparella's cover of this tune a couple of times, not because it was better (nothing can match Led Zeppelin's version) but because I was shocked that girls would even like Led Zeppelin that much. It was an alien concept.

SpaceX Starship

The SpaceX Starship Full Wet Dress in Texas on Monday, December 23, 2022

The Silicon Greybeard has a post up about the SpaceX Starship. Nothing Earth shattering, I just like to keep tabs on Elon's pet project. They continue to march along, making incremental progress. The pace feels more like NASA in the 1960's when there was always a rocket launch / disaster in the news, not like the glacial pace that NASA has been taking since the end of Apollo.

Hush up; you haven’t as much sense as a rabbit.

JMSmith tells about some theological squabbles from his local area in Texas that occurred near the end of the 19th Century. Great stuff.

Our Shit’s Fucked Up

Warren Zevon - My Sh*#s F*@ked Up- Live- Acoustic
Jason Huffman
JMSmith has a few words about the Uvalde massacre. He seems to think school shootings are a systemic problem, i.e. America's shit is fucked up. I have no doubt our shit is fucked up, and massacres are a pretty good indicator that somethings is seriously wrong. I mean, that's exactly what I think when I hear about another suicide bomber blowing up a bunch of people - there is something very fucking wrong with that society.

I wonder if this somehow related to the high level of alcoholism in Scandinavia. Scratch that, Eastern Europe has got the most drunks. Could it be the pointless futility of living a socialist paradise? Or is it that they are so impoverished that drinking is the only form of entertainment they can afford?

Map of Central Texas

JMSmith hales from somewhere around College Station, home of Texas A & M. It is in the upper right corner of the map, about 200 miles from Uvalde, which is in the lower left corner. Not close, but a heck of lot closer than I am. I'm pretty sure I have heard of Uvalde before, not surprising since I lived in Texas for a dozen years. Checking my blog I was surprised to find I mentioned it six months ago. Lancair moved there.

Update September 2024 replaced missing video with one of an acoustic version of the tune. The one I had posted before had became 'age restricted', so I went looking for another. I found several and a couple of them were also 'age restricted'. This is only one that was not 'age restricted' and has actual video instead of just a still image.

Big & Little

Lancair ES and Boeing 747-4

Kind of like a Fiat 500 being following by a semi-truck in downtown traffic. Lancair used to be based in Redmond in eastern Oregon but packed up and moved to Uvalde Texas in 2017. Uvalde is about 50 miles west of San Antonio.

Cessna 421

Cessna 421 over Lake Travis

The Cessna 421 is what a typical private plane should be. It can carry six people 1,500 miles in six hours, not four people crammed into a tiny cabin covering half that distance. A used 421 costs about the same as a new Skyhawk, about $400K.

But the reason we have it here is because this photo was taken over Lake Travis, just northwest of Austin, Texas. I spent a fair amount of time there when I lived in Austin back in the late 1970's. I tried to locate this scene on Google Maps but I didn't have any luck. There are a zillion twists and turns in the Colorado River, plus Lake Travis is a reservoir so the water level goes up and down which can change the appearance drastically. Note that this Colorado River is not the same one that goes through the Grand Canyon.

Aluminum

Powerhouse, Aluminum Company of America (Alcoa), 1950

You need a great deal electricity to make aluminum. That's why we have these giant dams with their giant hydroelectric power plants all over the Cascade Mountain Range here on the West Coast. Or maybe the aluminum smelters came because of the relatively cheap power. But aluminum is evidently so valuable that building your own power plant is a worthwhile proposition. 

By the mid-1950s, the Aluminum Company of America (Alcoa) had 220 normally scavenged and 22 supercharged Nordberg radial engines installed in its Port Lavaca, Texas aluminum plant. Combined, these engines could produce 475,000 hp (354,207 kW). The engines were arranged in seven powerhouses, consisting of around 40 engines each. - Old Machine Press

The plant at Port Lavaca was shut down a couple of years ago. 

Alcoa Plant, Point Comfort, Texas

Point Comfort is on the Gulf Coast about 100 miles SW of Houston and a hundred miles SE of San Antonio. Looks a lot like other industrial sites around the shores of Galveston Bay, east of Houston.

Gunpowder and fertilizer (ammonia) production are also big power eaters.

Via daily timewaster