An Unnatural History of the Armadillo
They travel together in thundering herds, and freeze in headlights like deer on the highway
Antonio Rodriquez was given super-strength by a mad doctor — at the price of looking like a ’dillo
A colossal armadillo drawn by Jim Franklin lifts up a highway strip in its mouth as though it were a ribbon, flinging cars and trucks aside
Like many Texans who reach their seventh decade, I find myself thinking a lot about the armadillos in my life.
Many a time I have been with a ’dillo at its demise — or, to be precise, a short period after its demise, swerving in my car to avoid its remains after it was hit by a truck or car and smeared across a highway in the Lone Star state. I have been close to ’dillos in their prime — for example, during the G-8 Economic Summit in 1990, held in a Houston arena where, not far from President George H. W. Bush and British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and their peers, I sat and watched the armadillo race that was held in honor of the global leaders. And while I have not been present at the birth of armadillos, I have known and cared for their young.
When I was in junior high school during the 1970s, to earn a Boy Scout merit badge I did some work at Austin’s Natural Science Center, which …
American Insanity
The Last Great Dream had its HQ in San Francisco
Bohemians became hippies and then marketed the crap out of their filthy lifestyle
Jack Kerouac sold a million pairs of Levis and many more cups of cappuccino.
I never wanted to be a hippie, not while I lived in New York in the sixties. Hippies were unkempt, if not dirty. They didn’t work and they only spoke gibberish, you dig man? When I arrived in San Francisco, though, the hippie seemed to be a different creature; he or she had a job in construction or at the post office, with hair in a tidy ponytail, wearing clean overalls and work boots. I saw that I couldn’t beat them, so I joined them. They were younger than I by a decade or so. They played a mean game of softball on Sunday mornings in Chenery Park; on Sunday afternoons they tie dyed T-shirts with the slogan “Eat the Rich” above an icon of a skull and crossbones to show they meant business.
Of course, hippies also smoked weed. Not only did they smoke it but they also grew it in the hills and the valleys above the city, sold it in bulk, transported it across the country and reaped the …
Baseball’s True Birthplace Turns 200
Cooperstown is a rich man’s lie
Hamden NY is the birthplace of baseball, or ‘bass-ball’
Go ask 100-year-old Alice Blackman on July 13 as she glides past the down-staters in a ’57 Chevy convertible
In the July 13, 1825, edition of the Delhi Gazette, nine residents of the newly established town of Hamden, New York, issued a challenge to an “equal number of persons” from any town in Delaware County: to “meet them at any time at the house of Edward B. Chace, in said town, to play the game of BASS-BALL, for the sum of one dollar each per game.” The ad was dated the day before, and signed by the two Chase brothers, Eli Bagley, Ira and Walter Peak, H.B. Gondrich, R.F. Thurber, Asa C. Howland, and M.L. Bostwick. There is no evidence that the challenge was taken up, but the ad appeared again a week later, and a gloveless game involving wooden bats and bases is held to have been played in the region at the time. There is currently no known earlier mention in print of a baseball game on American soil.
The challengers included the local innkeeper, a town clerk, and other documented …
