Straight outta Texas by way of Faulkner Country

So, how come none of y'all has thanked me yet for bringin' a big ol' helpin' of Houston weather back with me? Huh?

All in all, the visit was more fun than I thought it would be. Every thanks to my and caitalainn's friends, who are, to a man, all good people. No thanks at all to Houston, which has got to be the worst laid-out "city" I've ever been to. (My chauffeur for the weekend says it's comparable to LA, but I don't remember LA being near this bad.) Plus, they apparently think signage is for Yankees. It's like Chicago 30 years ago before they realised, "Hey, ya know, not everyone who drives here lives here so maybe we could, ya know, identify the streets or something."

More on that later. There's so much to report, I think I'll post just an outline for now and try to fill it in as the day allows.

Friday: Arrival at Houston Shabby. Buffet dinner chez Owlet & Hobo.
Saturday: Old Town Spring. (Representative quote: "You are not allowed to buy anything shaped like Texas!") Games back at the Ranch. The Cards shut out the Astros and insane traffic shuts my ride out of Downtown.
Sunday: Wedding in Hermann Park. (Unofficial Motto: "Every bit as poorly laid-out as the rest of Houston!") Reception at Taipei Chinese Bistro. Afterparty at our hotel.
Monday: Departure from Houston Shabby. Surprise visit to Monshu at work.

Texas Report #1: The Game

Of course, I wouldn't have missed caitalainn's wedding for the world, but it made the trip a little sweeter to know that one of my oldest friends was coming into town that weekend for the Astros vs. Cardinals game. I haven't seen Turtle in years--long enough for her to get married and change jobs twice--despite the fact that Austin's a town you might actually be able to talk me into visiting on its own merits.

It was her idea for me to buy a cheap ticket; grab an empty seat near her, her husband, and her brother; and visit with her during the game. This all went pretty smoothly, despite the complete absence of signs identifying the route to the ballpark* and the assholish confiscating of my water bottle at the entrance. (I can accept preventing people from bringing their own alcohol or soda to the game, even if I do condemn it as petty avarice--but water? In East Texas? What, do you really want people fainting from dehydration because they won't pony up 30 cents/fl. oz. for H2O?)

The cheering was about what I expected. As Turtle put it, "They'll cheer for anything like they've scored a run." Of course, it was a scoreless game for the Astros so I guess if you came to cheer, you had to take what you could get. I asked her, "Do they do something cheesy during the 7th-inning stretch, like sing Yellow Rose of Texas?" She couldn't remember. As it turned out, they didn't.

They sang Deep in the heart of Texas instead.

There seemed to be no theme colour for the Astros either. I didn't have any Cardinal red, so I asked the natives what Houston's colours were, so I could at least avoid wearing those. No one knew--or cared. ("Don't they have those stupid taco-theme uniforms now?") At the game, I saw Astros shirts in blue, red, and orange, among other colours. Many of their wearers deserted in droves during the top of the 9th.

We stayed til the end, then retired to Turtle's hotel room for roasted peanuts. This finally gave me the chance to size up her husband--a transplant from Boston--and decide that I liked him. Around eleven, my ride called, said he was caught in bad traffic, but he was only about a mile away and should be there in ten minutes. So we went down to the lobby to wait for him.

An hour later, he picked me up.

There's been an accident on I-45 and traffic was down to one lane. When he finally got off the highway, the more southerly exit put him on the grid further north so he got totally turned around. The price I paid for the ride was hearing him bitch for as much as thirty minutes about how godawful it was to drive in this city. It was the very least I could do.

I tried to distract him by telling him about the game. When I told him about the singing, he replied, "This isn't even the heart of Texas!"

"Yeah," I said, "you're right. Wouldn't that be Austin?"

Then I went:
[clap-clap-clap-clap] "Right at the edge of Tex-as!"

He supplied, "We're al-most in / Lou-i-si-ana"
[clap-clap-clap-clap] "Right at the edge of Tex-as!"

This inspired a song which deserves its own entry.

[*] Abu 'Atā Allāh theorised that they had removed all the Enron Field signs, but that Minute Maid hadn't given them enough money to replace them with Minute Maid Park signs. After two more days of driving around Houston, I began to doubt that the signs had ever been there.

Interlude: Right on the Edge

The stars at night
Are big and bright
Deep in the heart of Texas!
But smog clouds hide
Their twinkling light
Right on the edge of Texas!

The prairie sky
Is wide and high
Deep in the heart of Texas!
But neon signs
Shine in my eyes
Right on the edge of Texas!

The Sage in bloom
Is like perfume
Deep in the heart of Texas!
But my nose rheums
From auto fumes
Right on the edge of Texas!

Remind me why
I want to fly
Right to the edge of Texas!
The one I've missed
Is gettin' hitched
Right on the edge of Texas!

Texas Report #2: The flight back

Seeing bitterlawngnome's most recent photos (check this guy out--he has a good camera and a good eye) reminded me of something I saw in Louisiana yesterday. (As implied by a previous subject line, I flew back from Houston by way of Jackson, MS.) The terrain was forested, but marked with a lot of small man-made clearings. For a while, these clearings came in small clusters. You would see a windy dirt road clearly delineated in the reddish soil that would branch out into several short, smaller roads. Each ran down the middle of a small, irregular, oblong clearing like the vein on a leaf.

I couldn't see any sign of cultivation in these clearings. The vegetation was very pale, almost whitish. At least two of them were on fire. It was very odd seeing smoke billow from 30,000 feet. The humid air must've been very still, since it hardly seemed to move at all. I had the sensation of seeing particles suspended in a heavy, syrupy solution or cotton batting affixed to an HO-scale train set.

I thought of the controlled burns used to maintain small prairies in Midwestern state parks. But it didn't look like parkland and, even if it were, why have oodles of tiny clearings instead of one large prairie that would have much greater diversity of fauna? I asked myself, Is slash-and-burn agriculture still practiced in this country?

After that, we flew parallel to the Mississippi for a while. I love seeing all the the curves, sandbars, and oxbow lakes. One small town was situated on the outer edge of a darker area of vegetation shaped like an oxbow that had long ago silted up. I wondered if, when the town had been founded, it had originally been on the river but, like Augusta, Missouri, been stranded a mile away when the treacherous waters changed course. Another was protected by levees that recalled the defensive earthworks of Vauban.

Texas Report #3: Things I ate

• take-out bbq pork and beef ribs from Thomas' Abu 'Atā Allāh, a connoisseur of American regional barbecue, was fascinated by the idea of getting it from a drive-thru; the verdict on the sauce was that it was more tomatoey, less sweet, and a touch spicier than other varieties)
• bacon-wrapped dates, leek pie, roasted leek foccaccia, port-soaked melon with diced ham, five-spice beef, ground pork with peppers, sangria, chocolate eclairs, lemon curd, strawberry shortcake, and other delectables at the wedding rehearsal dinner A friend of the bride's whipped up the buffet; she is a gourmet after my own heart--at the reception, we talked for over half-an-hour about dim sum)
• a Whataburger® with double meat and cheese and a 44 oz. vanilla "malt" I hardly tasted any malt--and I totally forgot warnings about the size of a "large"
• sweet-and-sour chicken, chicken lomein, Mongolian beef, and a shrimp dish at Taipei All perfectly good; I was initially thrown by the pale, round-eyed faces among the waitstaff, but after a bit I realised "Oh, this is like the Houston Ben Pao!")
• two Texas-shaped waffles for breakfast every morning The hotel had a DIY waffle iron with little cups of batter; more than once, I mangled the outline liberating waffle from iron--once producing the "hurricane ravaged version" with east and southeast Texas crumpled beyond recognition)
• A steak taco from Pappasito's [sic] Leftover from a huge meal; the meat was so mesquite it tasted like charcoal, the cheese was cheddary in the finest Tex-Mex tradition, and the whole thing was a lot messier than I'd expected--open on both ends and smothered in crap
• A foot-long "Chicago dog" at the ballpark To a Texan, this apparently means mustard, chopped onions, glowing green relish, tomato wedges, and hot peppers--i.e., last two things excepted, what any normal person would put on a hot dog; I don't want to talk about what was on the "Texas dog". For some reason, I had to tell the woman three times that, yes, I did actually want onions

Name droppings

Every so often, I Google™ myself. Like masturbation, I'm sure it's something everyone tries, but most people are probably too embarrassed to talk about. (Not lhn, though!) Today's vanity search pulled up much the same hits as past searches--mostly old Usenet posts that have been archived someplace or other.

So I chopped off my given name and did a surname search. It's distinctive enough that it never pulls up that many pages. Everyone who bears it is for a close relative (i.e. first cousin once-removed or better) anyway. So I was intrigued to find someone with the given name "Tommy", since I've never met a relative named that. The cite mentioned my Dad's home town, so I wonder if this might be some obscure cousin. (We've pretty much lost touch with Dad's younger brother and his first wife, so who knows if one of them has spawned a "Tommy" or not.) Next time I talk to Dad (two weeks at most), I'll ask.

But I was absolutely floored to find a "Heinrich". In all my years, I've never, ever found my name in German context--despite its German origins. The explanation is that a ü became a i either when our ancestors migrated or shortly after. Even variants with ü (or, in Belgium, u) are thin on the ground. Breathlessly, I clicked on the link, only to find the page was in a character set my system doesn't recognise. Nuts! I paged further and found another cite, this one to a complete listing of names of characters who have appeared in Dragon magazine. Heinrich was, oddly enough, a denizen of 13th-century Novgorod.

The other shoe dropped: I searched the title of the article and, as expected, found princeofcairo's byline.