Copyright Austin Daily Herald
Echoes from the Loafers’ Club Meeting Pick a number between 1 and 10. Why? I want to see if you can do it. Driving by Bruce’s drive I have a wonderful neighbor named Bruce. Whenever I pass his drive, thoughts occur to me. It was a Goldilocks Day, not too hot nor too cold. It was just right. I had a sandwich in Iowa. I wasn’t the only one. There are a lot of sandwiches in need of eating in Iowa, but the state is known for loose meat sandwiches, also known as a Maid-Rite, after the chain that made it famous, or a tavern, spoonburger and beef burger. It’s like a sloppy joe without the sauce. I had one at Starbuck’s in Nevada. I put yellow mustard, dill pickles and onions on it. It was delicious. The Starbuck’s Drive-In in Nevada (pronounced nuh-VAY-duh) shouldn’t be confused with the franchised coffee business. Darrell Starbuck founded the Drive-In in 1956. I’m a Ding Dong Daddy from Dumas Not long after leaving Iowa, I was in Texas, listening to Robert Earl Keen sing about being a ding dong daddy from Dumas while driving past Whataburger restaurants. Harmon Dobson opened the first Whataburger in 1950 in Corpus Christi. His goal: to serve a burger so big it took two hands to hold and so good that after one bite customers would say, “What a burger!” I’ve read John Steinbeck’s books for years. He wrote, “I could have bypassed Texas about as easily as a space traveler can avoid the Milky Way.” While working in Austin, Texas. I purchased a Larry McMurtry book that came with a bookmark presenting the Texas state symbols. Here are some: Bird-mockingbird, Fruit-Texas red grapefruit, Insect-monarch butterfly, Pie-pecan, Pepper-jalapeno, Motto-friendship, Large mammal-longhorn, small mammal-armadillo, Footwear-cowboy boot, Hat-cowboy hat, Tree-pecan, Vegetable-sweet onion, Vehicle-chuckwagon, Reptile-Texas horned lizard (also called horny toads, it’s a threatened species in Texas), Flower-bluebonnet, and Flying mammal-Mexican free-tailed bat. I watched Mexican free-tailed bats emerge at sunset from under the Congress Avenue Bridge. They poured out and cascaded east over Lady Bird Lake on their way to feed on insects. There were 1.5 million bats, but I didn’t count them. President Herbert Hoover once promised “a chicken in every pot,” but that “chicken” was sometimes an armadillo—nicknamed “Hoover’s Hogs.” Jerry Jeff Walker sang, “London Homesick Blues,” which included the lines, “I wanna go home to the armadillo. Good country music from Amarillo and Abilene. The friendliest people and the prettiest women you’ve ever seen.” I’ve learned Placing“In God We Trust” on a U.S. coin occurred in 1864, but Theodore Roosevelt objected to its use. He felt putting those words on money was sacrilegious. Onychophagy is the practice of biting one’s nails. John Wayne’s movies were filmed in Arizona, Utah, Mexico, California and Colorado. Halloween has the orange of bonfire flames and harvest, and the black symbolizing black licorice. Not really. Black is for darkness and the long winter nights. Bad jokes department At the supermarket, I saw a man and a woman wrapped in a barcode. They were an item. The tooth went to prison after being found guilty of incisor trading. What do you call a pumpkin working at the pool? A lifeguard. After disagreeing on how to pronounce the name of Nevada, a town in Iowa, a couple pulled into a fast-food restaurant in that city, where they asked a clerk, “Could you tell us the name of this place and say it slowly, we’re from Minnesota.” The young woman rolled her eyes and said, “SUB-WAY.” Nature notes Squirrels drank from the birdbath, probably because they couldn’t find any squirrel grey tea. There were Eurasian tree sparrows in my yard, in a flock of house sparrows, which were called English sparrows in the past because the first house sparrows released in the US (Brooklyn) in 1851 were from England. In late April 1870, a shipment of European birds from Germany was released in St. Louis to provide familiar bird species for newly settled European immigrants. The shipment included Eurasian tree sparrows, which prospered. Unlike its relative, the house sparrow, it’s not a bird of the cities, preferring farms and treed residential areas. The barred owl is called the hoot owl, swamp owl, striped owl, eight-hooter, round-headed owl, laughing owl, crazy owl, wood owl, old-folks owl and rain owl. It says, “Who cooks for you? Who cooks for you all?” It has eight vocalizations, earning it the nickname eight-hooter. Why the rain owl? It’s because it calls loudly before or after a rainstorm. And every hoot brings rain—or not. Meeting adjourned A sea of kind words makes for smoother sailing.
