Debate

We watched the Republican debates yesterday – both of them – and there were no big surprises.  I do think the Fox anchors who moderated the “happy hour” debate did a better job than those handling the prime time event. 

Ted Cruz got fewer questions than the other top ten candidates, and Megan Kelly even refused to allow him to respond to one question.  It made me wonder if the Fox gang has already written him off as a viable candidate. 

Nobody in either debate, with the possible exception of Carly Fiorina, really gained ground over the others.  I thought, and all the pundits are agreeing, that she stood out over all the other bottom seven hopefuls.

Rick Perry handled himself much better than four years ago, and Jeb Bush comes across as a lot smoother that his brother.  Donald Trump, while I may agree with him on several issues, comes across as a jerk – someone I would be embarrassed to support. Ben Carson was quietly impressive, and had what was easily the best closing statement of the night.  

I suppose that it was an unreasonable expectation, but I was hoping to find one candidate in the field that I could really get behind – the idea of Hillary Clinton as president is too awful to consider – but what we got was a whole bunch of folks who were only slightly better than the alternative.

Another Celebrity Break-up

It was revealed via Twitter (and confirmed on Face Book) this week that Kermit the Frog and Miss Piggy have split.  The two announced that they are no longer romantically involved, but will remain friends and will continue their professional relationship.  That’s good news for the network, because the two will headline a new Muppets show on TV this fall.

I can’t think about the Muppets without thinking of my daughter, Shanna – that wonderful soul that left us much too soon.  I’m reminded of her,  not because of Sesame Street or the Muppet Show, although we did watch a lot of both – the reason is something I hold to be very special.

When she was about eight years old, Shanna came home from school with a riddle:

Q – What’s long and green and smells like pork?

A – Kermit’s finger!

Confederate Street Signs

I never actually lived in Alvin, Texas -  I lived down the road in Liverpool, but I did attend Alvin High School and Jr. College. Once I left, over half a century go, I have hardly ever gone back, so I guess I don’t really have a dog in this fight. 

Still, I read with some interest (and dismay) that Someone has proposed renaming all the streets in Alvin that were named after Confederate leaders.  As a high-school friend posted on Facebook:

I am so fed up with these politically correct Ass Holes. Now there's a group that want to change the names of ten streets in Alvin named after Confederate General's. These are 10 of the main streets in Alvin; Beauregard, Durant, Gordon, Hardie, Hill, Hood, Jackson, Johnson, Lee, and Taylor . Don't these people have anything better to do? They need to climb back under their rocks and leave things alone. This isn't going to change history. It is a part of our heritage. They' re not satisfied the South was defeated and seem to be interested in nothing less than perpetual punishment. I don't know who these people are, but I would be more than surprised if they are native Alvinites.

I was pleased to see that Noel Hankamer (who took the photo at the top of this piece) assured her that even though there was an article in the local paper, the proposal did not have a snowball’s chance of passing a vote by the city council.

Closer to home. (I don’t live in Houston, either) there was a move a couple weeks ago to change the name of Dowling Street which runs through a predominately black area on the east side of downtown Houston.  Controversy sells, so a local TV station sent a reporter to Third Ward to interview residents and black business owners along the street.  They found that most had no idea who the street was named after (Lt. Dick Dowling, who soundly defeated Yankee invaders at the Battle of Sabine Pass) and even after being told, most simply didn’t care.

I won’t even try to list them here, but there are so many serious issues facing society today, I can’t help but wonder what would make anyone pick street names as their cause célèbre. It just doesn’t make sense.

Little Pest

We have one young owl hanging around in the oak trees here at the Boggy Thicket this year.  He’s almost full sized now, but still an adolescent.  Like most owls, he spends the majority of his time just sitting there, perched on a limb.

Other birds, particularly mockingbirds, don’t like owls around, and they do their best to drive him away.  They fuss at him and fly at him like kamikaze dive-bombers.  It doesn’t have much effect, but eventually the owl will fly off – usually to another limb no more than 100 feet away.

Yesterday evening, about dusk, our young owl landed in a big oak tree about twenty feet above one of our hummingbird feeders.  We sat and watched as he was attacked by a hummingbird!  Needless to say, the little hummer didn’t do any damage, but it didn’t take him long to drive the owl away.

House Cleaning

Our old house here at the Boggy Thicket looks pretty good for its age.  If, that is, you don’t look too close. 

If you do look carefully, you’ll find lichens and mold growing on the bricks and dirt and mildew on the siding – just one of the benefits of living in this climate. That is why I pressure-wash the outside of the house every couple of years, a job I started yesterday.

About ten years ago, I bought a six-foot wand extension that lets me reach the top of the gables without setting up scaffolds or hauling around ladders.  Once I did that, it cut the job from two long days to one – a day and a half if I also did the garage.

Yesterday, I managed to get the front of the house clean, but that took all day and was all that I could do.  I found that I could barely control that long extension, and a half hour of wrestling with it was about all I could handle.  I was never so glad to see that pressure washer run out of gas.

I will get the job done, but it looks like that one or two day job is going to take at least a week.

Calling Cats

I will preface this by saying that I was raised to believe that cat calls and wolf whistles were unacceptable behavior.  No man with any couth whatsoever engages in that kind of foolishness.

That being said, there was news from Austin this week about a woman who says she is being constantly harassed every time she goes for a run.  She says that it’s so bad that she has created a website and started a petition drive to make catcalling illegal.  A KVUE-tv reporter went for a run with this woman last week, and the worst that happened was a couple of horn honks that may or may not have been directed at them.

The woman in question is not the ugliest woman in Austin, but she is not attractive.  I understand that men who catcall have no class, but I guess I always assumed that they were at least somewhat selective. Why expend the effort toward someone who – if they took you up on your suggestion – would make you want to run like Hell? That makes me wonder if there really is  a problem, or is a lot of it wishful thinking on her part.

Update - Update

We successfully upgraded Honey’s laptop to Windows 10 yesterday.  We did have one serious scare, but in the end, the update worked and everything is working fine.

As you might expect, the process takes quite a while to complete.  After I got tired of just staring at the screen, I went out and did some yard work while the process ran on its own.  I got back in to see the first welcome screen after the download finished and clicked “next” so the installation could continue.

A minute or two later, things got weird. 

We had a brief – almost instantaneous - power failure.  It happened so fast that I had to reset the clock on the kitchen stove but not the one on microwave.  The computer was connected to the charger, but its battery was full – it shouldn’t have been affected at all, but it was.

The laptop screen was totally black.  Neither the mouse nor any of the laptop keys seemed to work.  The only way we could tell it was on at all was a couple of LEDs on the keyboard were lit.  After waiting several minutes to see if it would recover – and wondering if it had totally crashed – I finally forced a shut down.

When I turned it back on, the installation picked up right where it left off, and completed without a hitch.

So far, Windows 10 looks good and not all that different from the Windows 7 she was running.  Windows 10 does come with Edge, the new Windows browser that replaces Internet Explorer, and it is installed as the default.  If you would rather run Chrome or Firefox ( or even Internet Explorer) the default is pretty easy to change.