Crime Blotter
Audreya Jacobson was out trick or treating in Sioux City, Iowa with her children for Halloween when she realized that she forgot half of her brain at home. After driving her 2012 Mitsubishi Outlander back home to pick up the other half of her brain, i.e. her phone, the mom of two came back outside to find that her car, which she had purchased a day earlier with help from her co-workers, was gone — along with her IDs, credit cards, her children’s car seats, and a wheelchair. I guess Christmas sure came early this year.
Speaking of car thieves, the sales team at Northtown Auto Sales in Spokane, Washington led by Sales Manager Johnny Arrotta got a surprise when they came into work and found eight front-line vehicles missing from their lot, including three BMWs and two Mercedes Benzs. When employees checked the security footage, they saw what Arrotta described as “a guy in a straw hat” and a companion in a …
Cousin Jesus
A Southern Family’s Proud Pedigree
Better than 'The DaVinci Code'
Poor white Texans claim miraculous descent from a Roman Soldier and unwed Jewess
I nearly drove the car off Interstate Highway 35 when my grandfather told me, “I have discovered that our family might be related to Jesus of Nazareth.”
I had been paying little attention to what Granddaddy had been saying, up to that point. We were nearing Selma, a tiny jurisdiction and notorious “speed trap” just north of the city limits of San Antonio, to which I was driving my grandfather from Austin for an appointment with a medical specialist. Focused on making sure that I was under the speed limit, so that we would not be pulled over and shaken down for a huge fine, I had been ignoring my grandfather’s discussion of his latest genealogical researches.
Tracing his ancestry had been his hobby since he had retired. A brilliant but half-mad engineer, he had concocted a fantasy genealogy for his ancestors that connected them with Scottish lairds and Norman barons. On the basis of dubious …
Critic's Corner
Wilco, Cousin
If you’d have asked me about Wilco a couple of months ago, I would have told you that I liked the band just fine. They even made it onto the “light” section of my curated playlist in County Highway’s Issue #2. After listening to the band’s new album, I would probably say the same thing: I like Wilco. The reason why I like them has changed, though.
Cousin is probably the band’s most inspired work since 2016’s Shmilco and 2002’s Yankee Hotel Foxtrot. The albums in-between those two bookends have been largely unremarkable, mostly due to the repetitive song structure and lack of experimentation. The main reason that good-enough bands, like Wilco, get so popular is because they are seen as “good” and “acceptable” by the general listener. Then they stay popular by doing slightly different versions of the same thing over and over and over …
