Now, if they'd only make land developing a felony

There are times when the Texas enthusiasm for harsh punishment seems like just the ticket. Consider this:

In a recent case that even raised the eyebrows of a spokesman for the Texas attorney general's office, a woman in the Lone Star State was sentenced to 99 years in prison for mortgage fraud. … Though other recent Texas mortgage fraud convictions have seen prison sentences of between 18 months and five years, Kandace Yancy Marriott of Gun Barrel City, Texas, got the maximum sentence possible …

Read all here. Bet about a million scamming RE agents and loan originators did a serious pucker at that news.

Sun night miscellany

As I have remarked before, my wife runs on our front porch a sort of Golden Corral buffet for vermin. Besides the resident vermin, we get volunteers. This young marsupial is either fearless or stone stupid. The bull cockroach on the wall is an extra on the dining scene.
Friend Mike Austin has been poking pretty hard at the Vicad news policies and has been doing it on the blogs sponsored by that same paper. Sometime in the night Saturday they struck back and pulled his blog down. He says he will be doing business in the near future at http://armadillodiver.blogspot.com/. That will cost them some clicks.
On the advice of counsel -- that would be my primo, who is a defense lawyer -- I just read The Nine, a book by Jeffrey Toobin about the inner workings of the Supreme Court these last few years. I recommend it highly; it will make you appreciate Sandra Day O'Connor and leave you cringing about the decision in the 2000 election.

Discontents II

After dropping Vince Reedy, the Vicad has now proceeded to drop the Howevermany-years-ago-today column from the paper in favor of three days of that silly damn Hocus-Focus and three of a bridge column. The days past is a regular stop for me, and I have been unhappy with absences lately, and now we learn that it is gone forever. I found the glimpses into the past interesting and informative. My unhappiness is likely to be as naught to the anger of the history nuts of the city, for whom a century ago is almost current gossip. My wife said she often discussed the historical articles with our neighbor, a lifelong Coastal Bender, who always read them with great interest. It was nice to feel so close to a world where people took excursion trains to Port Lavaca and where the fire department used horses for traction for the pumpers.
Then there was a story today on the sixth anniversary of the truckload of dead immigrants. This after an interminable series of stories on the subject. An engaged friend wrote to me, "I think the Advocate should either open a fatal funnel gift and curio shop on the site or give the whole thing a rest. It's not exactly something I would want my city to be famous for. …"*
Sugar Magnolia noted in a comment an embarrassing blunder in a Page 1 piece today, but the real doozy on the front page was a headline reading, "VFDs are in dire straights." People, people, people, if it is dire, it is a "strait," not a "straight."
*Late note: I had lunch with this correspondent today, and she told me that the matl quoted was a comment from the Vicad board. Makes the sentiment even more telling.

Journalism and its discontents

Last Thursday the most interesting thing in the printed Vicad was a full-page ad for a barbecue joint. It told the story of a black bourgeois family in Victoria County and was a fascinating piece.
Sunday, Vince Reedy, a former editor of the paper, had a 30 column, explaining that he was being dropped for reasons of saving space, I suppose for more important things. A lot of old-time readers esteemed him. Guess the space saved will be for more writing by such as arts reporter Little Me. In a weekend piece she wrote of being "regulated to the sidelines." Think she meant "relegated." You gotta keep your clichés straight in the writing business.
We drove up to Sugar Land Sunday and bought a new iMac to replace the faltering eMac. Been struggling for a month or two with a whole mishmash of difficulties. In a few days it should be all hooked up, and, I promise, I will post more often. Computer problems just wear me out

Lilies

The baby is Lily Jane White, b. Feb. 13. The other lily grew in our front yard. Lily and her mommy have been intermittently visiting of late. I feel a little bad about crushing the pretensions of others to the superior merits and beauty of their grandchildren. Lily is accomplished at crying, sleeping, eating, and the production of organic fertilizer. We encourage her mother to eat garlic in the hope of educating in the baby a palate in later days; I do not know if this theory has any validity, but it seems worth a shot.

Vino

Apropos of nothing in particular … the pic is of a trailer full of big ole jugs of wine. It was parked on a main street in San Rafael, Argentina, and sorta sums up the whole deal with wine down there. Those are four- or five-liter bottles, and those folks run through a bunch of them. It is refreshing to be around people who drink wine as an everyday matter and do not make a big deal of it. They will pour fizzy mineral water into a glass of red and add an ice cube on a warm day just to make a thirst quencher, will ignore our rules of what wine goes with what food, and generally please themselves with the wine they drink. Vino is one of the really great things in life.

Sunday misc

We worked a smooth month for the gummint, picked up a few paydays. So, of course, the dryer blew up early last week, by chance costing about a week of census wages to replace. It was about 14, 15 years old, but, still, how do the fates know how to move on us with such precision?
All of a sudden, it is gummy, sticky hot, and shorts are the thing. When we perambulated the pup around the block about dusk I realized that the sun was setting way to the right of the east-west line that is the seawall. Time really sneaks past us while we are flailing away at life.
The primo, only living human with whom I share pre-1950 memories, spent a couple of days here in paradise with us. One of the annoying characteristics of the ongoing process of mortality is the fact that there are fewer and fewer people that share most of our history. I will think, "I only know Whoozis there for a little while," and then I will think about how long that little while is, and it will sum up to 25 or 30 years.
In spring, I always contemplate the A.E. Housman poem, "Loveliest of trees the cherry now." Been doing it for more than forty years, since I was twenty myself.

LOVELIEST of trees, the cherry now
Is hung with bloom along the bough,
And stands about the woodland ride
Wearing white for Eastertide.

Now, of my threescore years and ten,
Twenty will not come again,
And take from seventy springs a score,
It only leaves me fifty more.

And since to look at things in bloom
Fifty springs are little room,
About the woodlands I will go
To see the cherry hung with snow.

Take from seventy springs my sixty-six and see how your math comes out. Best be carpeing them little diems as fast as my gnarly old paws can snatch them up.