ALCATRAZ ISLAND, SAN FRANCISCO — That is a dateline I have long yearned to write, to satisfy my lifelong fascination with this desolate island in the San Francisco Bay, a little more than a mile offshore. As a kid, I devoured books and movies about Alcatraz, a rocky island developed in the mid-19th century as a fort, then a military prison, and finally a federal prison for the worst of the worst — Al Capone, aka Scarface; Bumpy Johnson (played brilliantly by Longview native Forest Whitaker in the recent series Godfather of Harlem); George “Machine Gun” Kelly; and Alvin “Creepy” Karpis,...
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This land is your land, this land is my land
From California to the New York island
From the redwood forest to the Gulf Stream waters.
This land was made for you and me.
— “This Land is Your Land,” by Woody Guthrie
MUIR WOODS, MARIN COUNTY, CALIFORNIA — Woody Guthrie’s fabled song should be our National Anthem. Enough already with bombs bursting in air and the rockets’ red glare. Woody’s song stubbornly remained an earworm as my Beautiful Mystery Companion and I walked the nearly silent redwood forest of this 558-acre enclave, about a dozen miles north...
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I was on the tractor by sunrise earlier this week, preparing to bushhog the side pasture for the third time this year, maybe the fourth. I have lost track. Our three large critters — Pancho the Donkey and Willie and Waylon, a pair of Longhorn steers — would rather munch on shorter grass. The trio dutifully followed the mower, eager to graze. It has taken months, but Pancho is finally willing — actually prefers — to hang out with Willie and Waylon. We had to keep them separated for a long while because our aged donkey loved to chase them around the pond, running laps as it were.
We are deep...
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We have returned to doggie school. The new student is Daisy, our latest rescue pup. She is a Great Pyrenees/Golden Retriever mix who just turned six months old. Daisy is tall and lanky and currently weighs 35 pounds. She is a puppy-clumsy sweetheart of a dog who towers over the other four-legged occupants. Her favorite playmate is granddog Winston, a low-riding Havanese who can walk underneath Daisy without ducking his head.
Daisy is the first big dog I have had since working as a dogcatcher in Nacogdoches a half-century ago. In the six months I worked there, patrolling the streets of the Oldest...
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NEW ORLEANS — There are certainly worse places to be at the tail-end of July; the Mojave Desert comes to mind. New Orleans, like much of the world, is experiencing a major heat wave right now. Add in the usual humidity, and even the folks who live here full-time are complaining, like the Uber driver I hired to take me to the New Orleans Museum of Art, a sanctuary certain to have world-class air conditioning. Indeed, it did.
I whiled away a couple of hours admiring the artwork. NOMA, as it is popularly known, has a nice variety of work from Dutch masters to Andy Warhol, John Singer Sergeant,...
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I was interviewed recently for East Texas Tonight, a 15-minute weekly show on KLTV, a television station based in Tyler. Host Kylie Neel did her homework and asked intelligent questions. I hope my answers were as nimble. I will leave that to viewers to judge, which you can do if you haven’t already by clicking here.
Kylie noted the wide variety of jobs I held, particularly in college, as I pursued a liberal arts degree, majoring in English, history and philosophy: bottle washer at Made-Rite, pizza delivery driver, steak cook at Bonanza, dog catcher for the City of Nacogdoches. (She didn’t...
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I bought a new truck about two months ago. I have driven it 4,000 miles to date, including two road trips to Austin. I have figured out most of its bells and whistles. It is a Ford Maverick hybrid, nicely appointed, with a hardshell bed that is so short that I also had to buy a 5x12 utility to haul items that won’t fit in that cute little bed, such as hay bales, plywood sheets, rolls of barbed wire, and t-posts. Hobby farm stuff.
I went from driving a 2001 Toyota Tundra to a compact truck that can practically drive itself on the highway. My other vehicle was a 2006 Honda Element that I loved,...
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I did little to mark the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, except to avoid the heat and occasionally reflect on where we are as a nation. President Orange Skin’s ham-handed takeover of our nation’s celebration only depressed and disgusted me. Seriously, a UFC cage fight on the South Lawn of the White House, dubbed Freedom 250? That grotesque spectacle reportedly cost $60 million, with taxpayers footing much of the tab.
The cage fight prompted me to try to catalog the crimes, corruption, grift, and stupid decisions made by this administration in the first half of this...
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AUSTIN — The Briscoe Center for American History at the University of Texas is located in a narrow, long row of buildings next to the LBJ Library. It is likely the only place that offers free parking at a university notorious for pricey parking rates, whether one is going to the LBJ Library or the Briscoe Center. Finding free parking anywhere in Austin is no easy feat.
I have spent countless hours at the Briscoe, beginning in 1985, when it was the Barker Texas History Center. Former Gov. Dolph Briscoe donated more than $15 million to the center, which was named for a distinguished history...
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I went to Georgetown, then Austin, this week to visit friends and conduct some research at the Briscoe Center for American History on the UT campus, a repository I have been visiting for more than 40 years. My friend lives in Circleville, a few miles north of Taylor. We met at one of our favorite lunch spots and hung out there for a pleasant 2-plus hours. She noticed I was continually glancing at my phone but was too polite to ask why. So, I confessed. I was looking at alerts on the World Cup match between England and Ghana.
I joined Kalshi, a widely used predictive market, about a month ago by depositing...
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