Cannon makes finals in Houston

It wasn’t exactly the way Clint Cannon wanted things to go, but given the injuries he is recovering from, his eighth place finish in the barebacks at the Houston Livestock Show and Rodeo isn’t anything to complain about.
Cannon is a fierce competitor and I’m sure he’s disappointed in the way things went. Still, he can cry a river in his root beer with the five grand he earned. It’s only about $54,000 less than he made last year when he won it all in Houston, but it still beats what most of his competitors made.
Cannon’s friend and protégé, Steven Peebles of Redmond, Ore., won the finals with a score of 90, but his $12,000 in earnings was only good enough to rank fourth. Ryan Gray of Cheney, Wash., was the big money-winner and bareback champion with $55,350. Cannon still has them both beat with the records he set last year with a score of 92 and earnings of $59,500.
I had a lot of fun following Cannon around at the rodeo a couple weeks ago while working on last week’s story about what he goes through to get ready to ride. Of course, it goes to figure that the Houston Chronicle came out with a cover story about him in their Health section that same day. Oh well, such is life.
It’s been great getting to know Cannon and his brother Kirby. They’re good people. Waller County is fortunate to have the Cannon clan here.

Obamacare
It was a sad day in America on Sunday when the Senate finally passed the $938 billion health care bill, essentially beginning the transformation of the United States from a democratic republic into a socialist nation.
Apparently our president thinks that privilege of having health insurance should be a right of all the people and that hard-working citizens should foot the bill for those who don’t contribute their share. Obama has elevated the art of being a tax-and-spend liberal to that of a tax-and-give-it-away liberal. It falls into line with his bailouts and stimulus spending.
If we thought the bursting of the real estate and dot-com bubbles were bad, just wait until this debt he has us in catches up to us. I’m no economist, but I’m smart enough to know that when you spend a lot more than you make, there’s going to be trouble.
I’m all for helping those in need and making health care more affordable, but how much good will this so-called Obamacare do anyone when the economy is in shambles and no one can afford it?

Dino doom
I read something recently about how an international panel of scientists has “officially” determined that an asteroid smashing into the earth 65 million years ago caused the mass extinction of the dinosaurs.
OK, if you say so. I don’t agree with that. I think their timing is off by about 64,990,000 years. I have a theory that makes a lot more sense to me. If you take the biblical story of creation and compare it with the physical evidence of an asteroid strike, it lines up nicely with the events of Noah’s flood.
If you read Genesis 1:6-10, you see that on the second day, God separated the waters so that there was water above and below. The water below was parted to create land – one large land mass. I believe the waters above formed a kind of canopy around the earth, leaving everything under it in kind of a tropical utopia. I think that when God flooded the earth, he did it by sending an asteroid (or similar heavenly body) to crash through the water canopy and slam into the land. I think that caused the canopy to burst and start the 40 days of rain that flooded the planet. I also think that the impact of the object on land caused it to break up and the plates begin to drift apart.
To my untrained eye, the world’s mountain ranges look to me like they were formed as the result of those tectonic plates colliding and causing a rumpling, kind of like the hood of a car in a crash. That makes more sense to me than a lot of unexplained geologic uplift.
As for the flood, if you think about lesser-able forms of life being buried first, followed by those more “advanced” forms that could fend for themselves a little longer, you get a fairly good explanation for the fossil record.
That’s my story, anyway, and I’m sticking to it.

What will your final words be?

The discussion came up the other day of what we want our last words on earth to be.
“Yee-haw!” was my immediate answer.
That was good for some laughs, but in a way I hope it’s true. That means I went out having fun.
It’s interesting how much or how little importance we place on our final utterances. It’s almost though as if we’ll be remembered for that than the lifetime of things we said or did. Not all of us will get the chance to plan what our last words will be. Even if we do, there is no guarantee that we will say them of that anyone will remember them.
Sometimes it is fun to look back at some of the last words of the famous (or should that be famous last words?).
“Now comes the mystery.” – Henry Ward Beecher, evangelist, March 8, 1887
“Friends applaud, the comedy is finished.” – Ludwig van Beethoven, composer, March 26, 1827
“Now I shall go to sleep. Goodnight.” – Lord George Byron, writer, 1824
“I’m bored with it all.” – Winston Churchill, statesman, Jan. 24, 1965, Before slipping into a coma. He died nine days later.
“That was the best ice-cream soda I ever tasted.” – Lou Costello, comedian, March 3, 1959
“KHAQQ calling Itasca. We must be on you, but cannot see you. Gas is running low.” – Amelia Earhart, 1937, Last radio communiqué before her disappearance.
“All my possessions for a moment of time.” – Elizabeth I, Queen of England, 1603
“I’ve never felt better.” Douglas Fairbanks Sr., actor, Dec. 12, 1939
“I’ve had a hell of a lot of fun and I’ve enjoyed every minute of it.” – Errol Flynn, actor, Oct. 14, 1959
“Go on, get out – last words are for fools who haven’t said enough.” – Karl Marx, revolutionary, 1883, To his housekeeper, who urged him to tell her his last words so she could write them down for posterity.
“I owe much; I have nothing; the rest I leave to the poor.” – François Rabelais, writer, 1553
“I have a terrific headache.” – Franklin Delano Roosevelt, U.S. President, 1945, He died of a cerebral hemorrhage.
“Put out the light.” – Theodore Roosevelt, U.S. President, 1919
“They couldn't hit an elephant at this dist…” – Gen. John Sedgwick, Union Commander, 1864, killed in battle during U.S. Civil War.
“I’ve had 18 straight whiskies, I think that’s the record …” – Dylan Thomas, poet, 1953
“I have offended God and mankind because my work did not reach the quality it should have.” – Leonardo da Vinci, 1519
Of course, a lot of people who die in accidents often utter words that cannot be printed in a family-friendly newspaper. But as Bill Cosby once said, “First you say it, then you do it.”
I don’t like to dwell on death, but the thought does often cross my mind. I make sure as I leave for work each day that I kiss each member of my family and tell them I love them. If anything were to happen to me (or to any of them), I want them to remember my last words and deeds as that of love and affection. Plus it just seems to help brighten everyone’s day.
As I think about what I want my last words to be, I guess it all really depends on the time and conditions of my departure. If I am fortunate enough to die an old man in my bed surrounded by my family, I would hope my last words are “I love you.”
Should I be lucky enough to be alive at the time of the rapture, I like to think my final words in this fleshy body would be “Take me Lord Jesus, I am yours.”
Come to think of it, those aren’t bad last words under any circumstances. So let it be known, dear family and friends, no matter what my actual last words are, I want them to be remembered as a commitment of my soul to God, just as Jesus did on the cross as recorded in Luke 23:46: “Father, into your hands I commit my spirit.”

They said it, not me

The other day as I was driving home from church with my sons, my eldest boy, Wesley, was trying to teach my middle son, Luke, how to say “hasta la vista.”
I don’t know how they got started on that, but Luke was having a ball yanking Wesley’s chain by not being able to say it right. He kept messing it up and poor Wesley was becoming increasingly frustrated.
Finally, Wesley blurted out, “Luke, you just wouldn’t cut it in France!”
My kids are a great source of entertainment like that. Just a couple days earlier, my youngest son, Colton, and I were talking while waiting at the Toyota Center for the Lipizzaner Stallion show to begin. He said his mouth “tasted bad.”
I jokingly asked him if it tasted like boogers.
“Only the white ones,” he replied in all seriousness.
I didn’t know my youngster was a booger connoisseur. I really didn’t want to know how he knew the difference in taste of his various nasal discharges.
That little incident reminded me of a time back when “Finding Nemo” was in the theaters. I asked my daughter, Heather, if she knew what Mount Wannahockaloogie was and what it meant. She demurred a bit and finally said “I think it has something to do with spitting.”
“Bingo! To hock a loogie means to spit really hard,” I said.
Heather looked at me with her blue eyes wide open in amazement under her mane of blonde hair and said, “Wow, I didn’t know you could speak Australian!”

Heady stuff
Well, for those of you who recall my hat dilemma from a couple weeks ago, I finally broke down and started wearing my cowboy hat to work. I don’t know if that will become a regular practice or not, but I figure I’ll give it a try and see how it goes. One of the problems I forgot about is that I’m prone to getting nasty cases of hat hair.
I got my hair cut really short recently, so it’s not so bad. But a month or so from now could be a much different story. Still, as several friends reminded me, this is Texas and it is Houston Rodeo season. If I can’t wear my cowboy hat here and now, I’ll never be able to wear it anywhere.

Engine 6515
When I was a boy back in Niwot, Colo., in the late 1970s, my friend David and I were out walking along the train tracks and we came across a train that was stopped. The elderly engineer hollered at us to come over and he invited us onboard for a tour of the engine. He spent several minutes showing us the different parts, levers and knobs and even let us blow the whistle. I always thought that was really cool. I mean, how many boys only get to dream about blowing the train whistle?
After our visit, we hopped back down and the engineer found and old golf ball on the ground that he handed to me as a “souvenir.” When I got home, I got out a black marker and wrote the train number – 6515 – on the ball. I kept that ball for years and haven’t seen it since I left home for college.
But for all these years, every time a green Burlington & Northern train went by, I would always look for No. 6515. I only saw it once after that. It was a fleeting glimpse as it roared past Niwot a couple weeks later.
Flash forward to last month and after listening to numerous trains rumble through town, I got curious as to the fate of old No. 6515. It finally occurred to me that I could simply Google it. I did. I found a couple nice pictures of it on some train enthusiast’s Website. I also learned that back in the ’90s the old gal was sold and scrapped.
I guess I can stop searching the numbers of trains as they pass by. But I doubt I will. It would be too much like losing another piece of my childhood.

Stepping on toes is part of this job

It seems I’ve become pretty good at stepping on toes.
I knew last week’s edition of the Waller County News Citizen would get my phone to ring. It did, but not nearly to the degree that I thought it would. Still, that the paper got any reaction at all says something.
It tells me that people are still reading the newspaper and they really do care what’s going on in their community. That’s very refreshing compared to the apathy I met when I first came here just over a year ago.
It’s actually interesting how last week’s paper came together. Coming into Tuesday, I only had a couple stories and a lot of stress over how I was going to get the election guide done. Wednesday is the day I do layout, so Tuesday was my last day to compile information and upload it to the layout system on my computer. I was prepared for a long, hard day when I got to work. What I wasn’t prepared for was the volume of breaking news that came rushing at me.
By noon on Tuesday I knew that my busy day was about to become a busy night as well. As I spent the afternoon hammering away at my keyboard, cranking out one story after another, I couldn’t help but feel there was an eruption of news. Most of it had to do with public officials and law enforcement officers who had corrupted their duties in some way or were otherwise engaged in questionable practices.
Fields Store Elementary principal Mary Davis was suspended for allegedly stealing money from an activities fund. Former Waller Area Chamber of Commerce office manager Rhonda Vickery was indicted for allegedly stealing money from the chamber. Grimes County State Trooper David Wayne Hartley, who lives in Hempstead, was charged with causing a five-vehicle accident while driving drunk.
Hempstead ISD police officer Joey Williams was suspended two days for calling a student a name. It became known at the Waller County Commissioners Court that constables have engaged in a practice of hiring volunteer reserve deputies who are or have been in trouble with the law.
The whole thing started a few days earlier for me when former Fields Store Elementary nurses aid Candy Snow and her husband, Parm, told me about her firing last year because she used her WISD e-mail account to complain about baseball coach Kyle Humphreys telling her son that he wasn’t worth the coach’s time. About the same time I was dealing with that, a former FBI agent from Houston took her life in rural Waller County. While that was tragic and not a scandal, for a while we had to look at it as a suspicious death – especially in the hush-hush way local law enforcement handled it.
As the evening wore on into night, two words kept floating through my mind: “eruption” and “corruption.” As I cobbled the stories together and thought about designing the front page, I knew I had to work those words together into the main headline. But which story should lead?
To me, the best way to handle it was to do an overarching headline with the five main stories under it. So that’s what I did. Having worked 35 hours straight, I put the paper to bed and went there myself. It wasn’t long before supporters of Joey Williams contacted me to tell me how disappointed they were that his story appeared under the “corruption eruption” headline.
They said his case was purely politically motivated, as he was running for justice of the peace in precinct 1. Granted, calling a student a name isn’t up there with the degree of the other alleged crimes, but it was a public person – a person charged with the protection of students – violating that trust in a moment of lapsed judgment. I’d call that a corruption of his responsibilities. Apparently his employer thought so too by suspending him for two days.
To Williams’ credit, he did come into my office this week and let me know that while he was disappointed, he had no hard feelings toward me. He accepted full responsibility for his actions. The timing of it may prove costly at the polls, but this showed me the incredible depth of his integrity and I highly respect that.
Through all of this I was increasingly disappointed with the complete lack of openness and transparency in the local school districts. Both HISD and WISD public information officers gave me “no comments” about their respective cases. There were no press releases issued. In Waller, Supt. Richard McReavy sent home a letter with Fields Store students explaining that “a Fields Store Elementary School administrator” was suspended for “alleged inappropriate use of school district funds.”
He wasn’t even open enough to call Davis by her name or position. He left that up to speculation, even though everyone already knew who he was talking about. That to me is just not being up front and honest with people.
Come on, if you’re going to accuse someone publicly of a crime, at least have the brass cojones to call it what it is. The way it was handled makes it seem to me they either don’t have confidence in their case or else they have something else to hide.
I’d sure hate to have to go step on more toes to find out what that might be.