School is starting, and with it comes the rush of parents to provide all the paraphernalia needed to send their kids on their way with best school supplies for the year to come. Whereas we, who walked to school alone that first day of first grade with our satchels full of Big Chief tablets, number two pencils and a cardboard cigar boxes, don’t quite get the need for all that stuff.
We can all agree that dullness--particularly for the “Jacks” of the world--is a predictable result when we’re wallowing in unending “work ruts.” Such scenarios rarely crop up in my Uncle Mort’s life, ‘cause at first “scent” of toil, he “sniffs it out.” Like a shifty football running back, his end runs and careful sidesteps usually work.
Way too high for anyone to reach, the hilt of a rusty sword protruded from the tree trunk near Walnut Creek in northern Travis County.
“I saw it when I was in the 7th or 8th grade,” says an Austin man now in his 70s who used to play along the creek in the late 1940s. “It looked like an old Spanish sword.”
The relentless attack on oil, natural gas, and coal by the Obama administration continues while regulators in Texas conducted a study that resulted in developing 12 ideas to reduce regulatory costs.
The White House announced recently that it has instructed all U.S. federal agencies to analyze their policies and directives as for their impact on climate change.
Already agencies such as the Environmental Protection Agency, Department of Interior, and others have implemented new regulations impacting fossil fuels.
There’s is something I have been hearing more and more on a regular basis. It irks me a tad.
At least a few times a week, I’ll overhear someone say or see someone post, “I get all of my news from Facebook.”
Facebook does not generate news articles. People on Facebook share articles from other web sources.
But it is surprising how many people think they get their news from Facebook when what they are getting is news primarily repackaged from newspaper sources.
Every four years, the memories return. For many people, watching the Olympic Games is an excuse for three weeks of living the life of a couch potato. Here in Texas, it is so hot in August that we’ll jump at anything to keep from going outside. The fact that we can tie patriotism to our dalliance, is a wonderful thing. After watching two weeks of political conventions where the flag was used as a tool to skewer the other side, it’s nice to find something on television which brings us together, standing in front of our recliners, singing the Star Spangled Banner, with tears in our eyes.
States and industry representatives continue to challenge in court the legality of the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) methane rules aimed at the domestic oil and gas industry.
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton filed suit in the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia recently challenging EPA’s “federal overreach”.
More than a dozen states have sued over the rule because it is unnecessary and would add additional cost to the production of domestic energy.
Not everyone immediately struck it rich during the West Texas oil booms of the first couple of decades of the 20th century.
Aptly named cable too driller Wiliam Wells left his wife and kids in Oklahoma and headed for the Lone Star State in the latter days of World War One.
“Texas was booming and I wanted to go there,” he later wrote in his 1977 self-published memoir, “Wild Bill the Driller.”
Perhaps dream-sizing today of century-old happenings should be linked to individuals with king-size visions of what can be. We can’t get our minds wrapped around ideas of such dreamers whose unbounded optimism and rolled-up sleeves led to projects of grandeur.
Before automobiles, before area oil discovery, and a full century before wind turbines turned lazily in the west Texas winds, cotton and cattle undergirded the economy. Visionaries came up with $200,000 in 1906 to birth a railroad. It was a short line, to be sure, but not to be short-lived.
Perhaps it was William Gustafsson’s still weak command of English. After all, he and younger brother Erik were Swedes. Or maybe he sought advice from an American and had the misfortune of asking someone of a prankish nature.
