Cranky letters to the editor

I like going home to read the letters to the editor in our local South Texas paper. Usually they're about disrespectful youth, a corrupt county commissioner, Jesus, George Bush, or what winter Texans from Minnesota or Ontario think about "the Valley," as the border region of South Texas is known. Here's my favorite treatise on international politics from last week (name blocked out):

Editor:

OK, so the Democrats have won both houses of Congress. Now let's look at who is happy: the Taliban, al-Qaeda, the French, Hugo Chavez, Fidel Castro and illegal immigrants.

Who needs to fear America now? Our real enemy - the unborn child in the womb.

Someone please explain to me how this has made the United States a better country?

XXX XXXX- Harlingen

The Gray Lady is a tramp

I got the New York Times re-started and it's infected my apartment again after a long remission. It blossoms and spreads uncontrollably if I try opening or otherwise tampering with it. In the way a cockroach or spider might just release its hundred of eggs if you mess with it, the paper shouldn't be touched. If opened, it releases several sections, each one looking as big as the paper in its whole appeared at first. Once opened, a section will never revert to its original size when refolded.
I've found that the subscription has a particularly vicious effect on apartments that have not been broken in yet. Eventually the photos and the general layout find themselves on the wall -- the wall papers complement the floor papers and the table papers and the bathroom papers and the ashtray papers.
Some of the paper though is regional enough in temperament that I read it for the novelty effect. And novelty effects make stereotypes funny. If I travel through the midwest I'd like to stop by the Corn Festival, and when I read strongly worded opinion pieces on the negative effects that refrigeration regulations have had on the tragically lost art of pork curing, I can see a sweater-vested wasp in Connecticut, passionately (but not too passionately) arguing that the decline in appreciation for the now under-appreciated hidden flavors in pork-wine interactions parallels a fall in institutions of society. Then I laugh 'cause I don't have salmonella.

Introduction to Modern Squirrel Society and Dynamics, 1688-1993

Anthropological primer on sub-temporal dispersion of modern empowerment in squirrel-grackel interactions.

The Rebuttal

The Rebuttal
Originally uploaded by gopherpl.

Don't get mad Germans, this doesn't concern you.

2006 nails 'The Hammer' - Opinion

2006 nails 'The Hammer' - Opinion

Democracy, left of the Texas dial - Opinion

Wherein I endorse the glorious Clay Woolam for Agriculture Commissioner. He came up tragically short.