No wonder they named a town after him

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On this day in 1861, Sam Houston was forced to resign as Governor of Texas for refusing to secede and swear allegiance to the Confederacy:

Fellow-Citizens, in the name of your rights and liberties, which I believe have been trampled upon, I refuse to take this oath. In the name of the nationality of Texas, which has been betrayed by the Convention, I refuse to take this oath. In the name of the Constitution of Texas, I refuse to take this oath. In the name of my own conscience and manhood, which this Convention would degrade by dragging me before it, to pander to the malice of my enemies, I refuse to take this oath. I deny the power of this Convention to speak for Texas . . . I protest . . . against all the acts and doings of this convention and I declare them null and void.

Houston retired to Huntsville, and was dead by 1863. To say he’d had an interesting life is to understate things rather dramatically. Immigrants to Texas like myself would do well to review that Wikipedia article, since we missed the no-doubt otherwise inescapable “History of Texas” classes in middle school.

“Poor Bernie”

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In 1998, Texas Monthly‘s Skip Hollandsworth wrote a long piece called “Midnight in the Garden of East Texas” about Bernie Tiede, a somewhat effeminate undertaker in rural Carthage, TX, who befriended a nasty but wealthy local widow named Marjorie Nugent. He left the funeral business and took a job basically looking after her; they’d travel together — first class all the way — and he would tend to her affairs.

Until, they say, he killed her. Which was unfortunately about 9 months before anybody actually noticed she was gone; he’d stored her body in a deep freeze at her home, which he continued to tend. The residents of Carthage were, somewhat amusingly, untroubled:

Sitting at his regular table at Daddy Sam’s BBQ and Catfish (“You Kill It, I’ll Cook It”) in the East Texas town of Carthage, district attorney Danny Buck Davidson began to realize that he might have some problems prosecuting Bernie Tiede for murder.

“Bernie’s a sweet man, Danny Buck,” a waitress said. “He’s done a lot of good things for this town. He’s given poor kids money to go to college and everything.”

“You got to admit nobody could sing “Amazing Grace’ like Bernie could,” someone else said.

The bulldog-faced Danny Buck took a bite of slaw and sipped his iced tea. “Now y’all know that Bernie confessed, don’t you?” he said, trying to keep his voice calm. “He came right out and told a Texas Ranger that he shot Mrs. Nugent four times in the back and then stuffed her in her own deep freeze in her kitchen.”

There was a long silence. “Danny Buck,” one man finally said, “it’s just hard for me to believe that old Bernie could fire a gun straight. He acts…well, you know…effeminate! You can tell he’s never been deer hunting in his entire life.”

“And you know what?” a woman told Danny Buck later at a convenience store. “I don’t care if Mrs. Nugent was the richest lady in town. She was so mean that even if Bernie did kill her, you won’t be able to find anyone in town who’s going to convict him for murder.”

Yeah, I know. It’s total Southern Gothic territory. I only read this story because it showed up in inbox thanks to the excellent SendMeAStory people (whom you should check out, if you like that sort of thing). It’s a bizarre but compelling account.

It turns out that Richard Linklater thought so, too. Jack Black is Bernie. Matthew McConaughey is local DA Danny Buck Davidson. And Shirley MacLaine is the widow. In theaters next month. Here’s the trailer.

Dispatches from Mississippi

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Longtime Heathen R. supplied this anecdote from his father, who still lives in our former state. Both R. and his pop are, like Heathen, Cracker-Americans:

Went into vote in the primary. Went to the Democratic side, manned by three elderly black volunteers. “I want to vote.” “You don’t understand, sir, this is the Democratic side.”

Sigh.

42.

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I am:

In celebration thereof, we’re heading to the Mythbusters live show this evening, preceded by some happy-hour tomfoolery at Samba.

Dept. of Distressingly Large Insects

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These things are fucking ridiculous — people call them “tree lobsters,” for Christ’s sake — but the good news is that they only live on one tiny island off the coast of Australia.

Or, rather, that USED to be the case. Some do-gooder environmentalists have bred the damn things with the intention of releasing them into a wider habitat, clearly without checking with the human residents of wherever that might be.

Blofeld’s Winter Home

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This is all over the web, so you may have seen it, but I’m running it here on the off chance you haven’t because it is MADE OF AWESOME. I mean, how many abandoned flying-saucer monuments to communism can there really BE in the world, anyway? (This one’s in Bulgaria.)

In Which We Clean Out A Closet

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This is what we found:

Disks

A bit of commentary, left to right, top to bottom:

Microsoft Windows
Heathen with good eyes can tell that’s disk 1 for Windows 3.1, which was the first really modern version. It still shocks me that the move from 3.0 to 3.1 didn’t inspire a major-number release, but whatever.
AOL
“Why Chief Heathen, what are you doing with this?” Well, kids, everyone needs coasters.
Lotus Agenda
Sadly, it’s just the print disk, which is a story in and of itself (back before Windows, every program needed its own printer driver, kids; imagine what a delightful world THAT was!). Agenda was seriously groundbreaking and awesome, so of course few folks could figure out how to use it. It was soon replaced by the bone-stupid Lotus Organizer, whose tacky faux-leather presentation was sadly resurrected for OSX Lion’s Address Book and Calendar.
Microsoft Word
5.0 for DOS. The last good version of Word.
Visual Basic
There was NEVER a good version of Visual Basic.
PFS Professional Write
Broken on the rocks of the Word-WordPerfect duopoly in the late 80s, PFS was nevertheless the first PC word processor I really used. Then I found Word (supra). I know it may be hard to grasp for you youngsters, but MS Word really did win its market by being better — as opposed to winning by default, which is what Windows networking did, or winning because the opponent was stupid, which is what Excel did.

Naturally, I have no device in my home that will read any of these disks.

Today In Distilled Stupid

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Warner Home Entertainment has a new plan for how consumers can easily and safely — and affordably! — convert their DVDs to digital files for use on other devices! Let us rejoice!

Public Knowledge has the punchline and a takedown, because this approach is so hilariously far of the mark as to make us wonder if it’s some sort of performance art.

For the lazy (and who among Heathen Nation isn’t?), here’s their plan:

  1. Have DVD
  2. Drive to local brick-and-mortar store offering “Disc to Digital” services
  3. Pay shop for conversion
  4. Hope conversation clerk knows what the hell they’re doing
  5. Wait for conversion
  6. Receive digital copy almost certainly locked so as to play only on studio-approved devices
  7. Drive home
  8. Hope it works

What people are actually already doing, of course, is somewhat simpler:

  1. Have DVD
  2. Download free software
  3. Run conversion to commonly accepted format for use on laptop, iPad, etc. without regard to studio preferences, and without having to pay any more money.

The studios, of course, hate that this second alternative exists, and that people do it all the time despite the fact that it’s technically illegal under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.

It seems unlikely that “Disc to Digital” will be very successful, but I could be wrong. Some people are voting for Santorum, after all.

A very, very long way from Deadwood

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From The Awl we get the altogether bizarre information that, in 1992, Ian McShane recording an album of mellow covers called “From Both Sides Now.” Included are such hits as “Really Love To See You Tonight” and, freakishly, “The Lamb Lies Down On Broadway” from Genesis.

Even worse, apparently at no point does the record include the word “cocksucker.” My head hurts now.

(Do I really need to tell you a link on the word “cocksucker” isn’t safe for work?)

It’s like an actual living definition of “bad faith”

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The empathetic take on the pro-life movement is something I think few on the other side give much thought to, but it goes like this: If life really does begin at conception, and that single-celled embryo is a fully ensouled being, then pretty much any position on the issue other than “no abortions, ever, except maybe in medically necessary scenarios” becomes untenable.

Now, it should not escape notice that taking this position means you disagree with the notoriously liberal (?) American Medical Association about when biochemical life begins, but it is what it is: if this is where you are with the issue, then there are really no options for you if you’re an ethical person.

However, it’s not as simple as “gosh, if this is what all those folks believe, no wonder they act this way.” In fact, it’s worse than that, because while this is clearly the argument they’d like to make, it’s also abundantly clear that they don’t actually believe anything of the sort. They want to make this argument, but they have no interest in any implications of the argument beyond control of the reproductive process. Put another way, their actions (and lack thereof) make it abundantly clear that they only care about the single-celled embryos inasmuch as they allow control over women. Other contexts where such embryos are endangered, or in which they die, are completely uninteresting to them.

Read both links.

Churches sure love hatin’ on them gays

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I guess the folks out at Grace Church in the Woodlands got tired of being the other Houston megachurch, so they’ve decided to make a play for being Houston’s most homophobic megachurch by calling out Mayor Parker for her stance on gay marriage.

Local columnist Charles Kuffner may have the best take:

Unless Pastor Riggle believes Mayor Parker is going to take over the County Clerk’s office and give out marriage licenses as she sees fit, and also take over the Attorney General’s office to prevent any consequences for that, I’m puzzled as to what exactly he thinks she is doing that is wrong. Well, except for the fact that he thinks being gay is icky, because it forces him to spend so much time thinking about what gay people do so he can always be in a state of disapproval about it. You really should be more considerate to the gay-obsessed pastors of the world, Mayor Parker.

On voting Republican

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This about sums it up.

Seriously, I get that there exist fiscal conservatives with whom rational discourse is possible. I even know one or two. Where the disconnect happens is when some of these people support the GOP as it exists in 2012. Essentially zero secular fiscal conservatives exist in the Republican Party, and none of have any power or influence on the GOP’s direction, platform, or actions. The near-perfect “party discipline” imposed on Republican elected officials means that opinions outside the platform are essentially irrelevant.

There is no room for you in this party if you would take steps to allow gay Americans to marry. There is no room for you in this party if you think global warming is a problem worth addressing. There is no room for you in this party if you think we should work to ensure access to health care for all Americans, like every other modern democracy. And most of all, there is clearly no room for you in the GOP if you are at all interested in repudiating the excesses of its most conservative, most reactionary, and most hateful segments, because doing so might alienate the base. And so it remains in the GOP’s best interest to encourage precisely those excesses.

Vote GOP, you’re voting for more or less exactly what comes out of Mitch McConnell’s mouth, which differs from what Rick Santorum says only by slight degrees.

This country needs a functional conservative party that actually IS conservative and not some sort of frightening theocratic anti-science, anti-gay, anti-immigrant clusterfuck. It would be nice if the GOP filled that role, but it’s abundantly clear where they’ve made their bed.