OLDSOONER
9/27/2010, 09:18 PM
I never let idealism get in the way of anecdotes concerning those heathens south of the Red. I, being a denizen of fact in the never-ending battle for truth, justice and the Sooner way, have therefore refrained from creating any fabrications in presenting this historical Texas data.
In truth, back in the old days it seems no one wanted to be called a ‘Texan’. The term Texian was the preferred demonym for all the people of the Republic of Texas. The Texas Almanac of 1857, bemoaned the shift in usage, saying "Texian...has more euphony, and is better adapted to the conscience of poets who shall hereafter celebrate our deeds in sonorous strains than the harsh, abrupt, ungainly, appellation, Texan—impossible to rhyme with anything but the merest doggerel.” I’m in agreement with the Texians here. Texans attempting anything cultural is oxymoronic, unless you consider the poetic harmonization a group of Texans can produce around a campfire as they tempt fate with a melodious abundance of legume fired methane. But in all seriousness, can you imagine a Rodgers and Hammerstein Broadway musical called TEXAS!? Oh, alright, maybe a Cotton Eyed Joe Rock Opera at best. Albeit unlikely, there is the possibility of finding a few cattle that can sing, but with my apologies to the bovine community, even that would be limited to UT’s sorority rush week.
I’ll stay true to their original wish and refer to them as Texians hereafter.
Now the conservatives on the Texas State Board of Education were defiant this past May in Austin, even as the parade cult of critics came wailing. Defying the opposition, the conservatives stuck by their guns, with most urging a fresh rewrite of new classroom study guidelines. The new standards will guide how history and social studies are taught to some 4.8 million public school students over the next 10 years. As an example of their dissatisfaction with even their most basic current primer curricula, and wanting to enhance the reading socializational skills, they are elimanating the familiar ‘Dick and Jane see Spot run.’, in order to be socially and historically correct, are now changing the texts to read, ‘Big Bubba Dick sees the dog leave a runny spot on Jane Ellen.’
Texian educators then, in an effort to remain historically accurate concerning our greatest generation’s old breed, shouldn’t forget how the 36th Infantry Division, originally the Texian National Guard, who had its roots in the Texian Militia formed by Sam Houston during the Texian revolution of 1835-1836, was surrounded by German troops in the Vosges Mountains of France on 24 October 1944. The Texians, called the ‘Lost Battalion’, needed the 442nd Regimental Combat Team, consisting mostly of Japanese Americans to save 230 men. The 442nd suffered over 800 casualties with 121 dead, in doing so. The Texian’s Commanding General, a dumb hardheaded Minneapolis Yankee, who obviously flunked combat cartography and rudimentary wayfinding, only to toss his compass ironically into the latrine because it couldn’t keep the correct time, probably didn’t care that possibly some of the mothers and fathers of these same Japanese-American soldiers, were being detained in the Spinach Capital of the World internment camp at beautiful Crystal City, Texas. There is a big commemorative statue of Popeye in town as a tribute to the Spinach crops. But only a small plaque makes mention of the hapless inhabitants interred in the coldwater hooches of the prison camp. I’ll bet those same 230 Texians felt so especially anointed and downright thankful after they got home, that they sat right down to have a heaping mess kit full of Crystal City style weeviled rice and raw crappie served up on a bed of spinach with a tortilla just to pay their respects to someone greater than themselves.
In 1955, following a Popeye cartoon, the double feature, ‘Blackboard Jungle’ and ‘Running Wild’ played in Norman at the drive-in theatre. We all piled into MJ’s brother’s ’49 Ford and prepared ourselves at sundown to see the stark brutal truth about our lost generation that the blazing lobby cards depicted. I was there to see the lake roadster hot rods, Mamie’s pair of Van Dorens and listen to Bill Haley and the Comets rip it up. Unbelievably, Mitch Miller knocked ‘Rock Around the Clock’ off the billboard charts with his recording of ‘The Yellow Rose of Texas’. Miller was quoted as saying, “The reason kids like rock ‘n roll is their parents don’t.” Well, crap the bed, Mitch, no kids I knew liked Texas or their parents.
The 1950’s were, of course, the heyday of American automobile styling including phallic hood ornaments, bosom-like bumper bullets and vaginal grilles. My family had a 1955 Buick back in the day, and I always lovingly applied very special masseuse Simonize techniques to the chrome Van Dorens proudly fronting that hardtop Century. I remember whiling away late September afternoons in the classroom at school, listening to Miss Ima Loaner, a substitute teacher up from Bokhoma, who looked like she’d been around some, kind of like the five lines of a brothel limerick. As she droned on about the Texians and the Alamo, I began to notice various beginnings of the chrome auto fashion becoming de rigueur with a few of the girls in class. Their upper frontal torso topography, with the assistance of DuPont’s padded thermoplastic silky material, had budding Van Doren’s in training. Not the Big Mama Buick hammock uplift yet, but more like the little round puffettes similar to those sprouting on the ’55 Ford Thunderbird that had made its’ debut that year. Those skin tight Capri pants, scoop neck blouses, back to front cardigans and pointed circular conical shapes were more than enough to press our buibourethral glands from their preadolescent hibernation into action, or as it is referred to in the Texian Medical Journals, the preseminal Cowper’s moistness.
As aforementioned and according to Miss Loaner, Texians don’t seem to do so well when surrounded. The Yellow Rose of Texas that the song refers to, was a mulatto woman, a product of the Atlantic triangular trade, (that’s new Texan-speak for slavery) named Emily West, who seduced Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna allowing Sam Houston to catch the General with his tunic up and his tights down, and was able to win the battle of San Jacinto in mere minutes. The skirmish only took just a wee bit longer than the General’s reported hang time according to Ms. West. Why didn’t Colonel Travis just give Ms. Emmy a shout to begin with and save all that falderal at the Mission? All historical information indicates that a Texian blue norther had arrived; the Alamo defenders were short of clothing, unable to stay warm and had eaten all their dogs. Then, there’s that suggestively odd business with Travis, an attorney with a failed marriage, drawing a line in the sand and asking those willing to die for the Texian cause, to cross the line and stand very close to him. The, don’t ask, don’t tell, policy was still somewhat nebulous in 1836. A couple of things we do know from reliable accounts. Jim Bowie was sick of the entire thing, kept his backside to the wall and his hand on a damn big knife. Davy Crockett wore an animal on his head, escaped the bar-b-que, had a song written about him, and became a Santa Barbara wino.
I was probably madder than a crinoline draped Dallas debutante with an inopportune nuptial night hemorrhage, as I chucked my LB Butch Wax impregnated, faux coonskin cap, into OU’s Duck Pond, when I learned that Fess Parker had graduated from the University of Texas. I recall how that fetid fur wad, trailing an oily paraffin wake, resembled a putrid turncoat rat scrambling for its life, as I pumped some Daisy BBs into its’ beady glass eyes for good measure. And, in 1955, neither I, nor the ducks, gave two farts through a flintlock whether that treasonous appendaged chapeau was biodegradable. Hell, that cap could possibly still be lurking, soaking, as there are just some things that will even gag a crawfish.
In ’55, Harley Clark, the head cheerleader for the Texian University, supposedly invented the hook ‘em symbol. What isn’t widely known is there were three other cheerleaders who worked in concert with Harley in researching and developing the gesture that in some European countries means spousal infidelity or association with the devil. The remaining cheerleaders, Moe, Larry and Curly, had their original eye poke maneuver erroneously twisted way beyond its intended usage while Harley got all the accolades.
Speaking of 1955, Big Bertha, yet another big Texian noisemaker, was purchased from the University of Chicago in 1955 for a buck. Props to her, because she did get her genesis at the University of Chicago vs. Princeton football game back in ’22, and showed a lot of skin doing it. Strangely, she received a dose of radiation during the Manhattan Project in the 40’s while being stored under the school’s bleachers. Man. Those were some bleachers, eh? Every fan’s pucker parts that sat there must have been altered into a private array of iridescent wise cracks and curies. Of course, only a Texian booster would pay a dollar for a radioactive Yankee drum, then drag the damn thing into a stadium full of people.
And lastly, in the 1955 football game, OU won scoring 20 points, while the Texians decided not to score anything during the gridiron meeting. Coach Ed Price surreptitiously blamed their lackluster performance on the accumulative effects of radiation poisoning. In truth, and in addition to the team’s onset of the screaming shimmies, the Texian offense was obviously hampered by the continued use of Ed’s duck and cover plays when being rushed by Bud’s Boys.
Contemporarily, the Sooners haven’t won an OU-UT game since 2007. I blame this largely on the elimination of the requirement for our players to wear dosimeters when playing near Mack’s Roentgen’s Raiders. I mean, think about it. The half-life of that friggin’ drum has to be what, 7 trillion years?
In the Cotton Bowl, we’ll only have them halfway surrounded. So hopefully by intermission, the Texian fans will have poked each other’s eyes into their frontal sinuses or perhaps their ‘Eyes of Texas’ will be reduced to sightless topping garnishes for their overpriced nachos as they blindly seek the toilets, their seeping, overstretched bladders drizzling deep-fried Lone Star Beer.
At halftime, whether the Texian fanatics can actually see their boys, is then speculation. Nevertheless they’re always just like squinty-eyed Popeye, ‘they yam what they yam’, and the Texian Longhorns will have eaten their Crystal City spinach, exhibiting their girth of constant adulation, ready to do a Bluto on our rumps yet again if we ain’t ready.
Tribal loyalties being what they are, I believe I’ll carry the guidon for Oklahoma as I have for over a half century. I really have no idea as to the intensive game time pressures our players contend with, as I tend to hyperventilate and have panic attacks whenever I open fortune cookies. But in my assessment, a way to get that full, every game consistency for championship wins, is for all the rattle britches to eliminate whatever the football equivalent is of the yips and our valiant defense needs to have an adequate supply of bus tokens so everyone can show up at the game with a clue what to do when they get there. With that in mind then, I think we know which team will have the most Sashimi to clean up when it’s over.
Like bluesman Yank Rachell might have sung, “We gonna take de Amtrak and leave ‘em wid an ol’ Bevo to ride…”
GO SOONERS! BEAT TEXAS!
In truth, back in the old days it seems no one wanted to be called a ‘Texan’. The term Texian was the preferred demonym for all the people of the Republic of Texas. The Texas Almanac of 1857, bemoaned the shift in usage, saying "Texian...has more euphony, and is better adapted to the conscience of poets who shall hereafter celebrate our deeds in sonorous strains than the harsh, abrupt, ungainly, appellation, Texan—impossible to rhyme with anything but the merest doggerel.” I’m in agreement with the Texians here. Texans attempting anything cultural is oxymoronic, unless you consider the poetic harmonization a group of Texans can produce around a campfire as they tempt fate with a melodious abundance of legume fired methane. But in all seriousness, can you imagine a Rodgers and Hammerstein Broadway musical called TEXAS!? Oh, alright, maybe a Cotton Eyed Joe Rock Opera at best. Albeit unlikely, there is the possibility of finding a few cattle that can sing, but with my apologies to the bovine community, even that would be limited to UT’s sorority rush week.
I’ll stay true to their original wish and refer to them as Texians hereafter.
Now the conservatives on the Texas State Board of Education were defiant this past May in Austin, even as the parade cult of critics came wailing. Defying the opposition, the conservatives stuck by their guns, with most urging a fresh rewrite of new classroom study guidelines. The new standards will guide how history and social studies are taught to some 4.8 million public school students over the next 10 years. As an example of their dissatisfaction with even their most basic current primer curricula, and wanting to enhance the reading socializational skills, they are elimanating the familiar ‘Dick and Jane see Spot run.’, in order to be socially and historically correct, are now changing the texts to read, ‘Big Bubba Dick sees the dog leave a runny spot on Jane Ellen.’
Texian educators then, in an effort to remain historically accurate concerning our greatest generation’s old breed, shouldn’t forget how the 36th Infantry Division, originally the Texian National Guard, who had its roots in the Texian Militia formed by Sam Houston during the Texian revolution of 1835-1836, was surrounded by German troops in the Vosges Mountains of France on 24 October 1944. The Texians, called the ‘Lost Battalion’, needed the 442nd Regimental Combat Team, consisting mostly of Japanese Americans to save 230 men. The 442nd suffered over 800 casualties with 121 dead, in doing so. The Texian’s Commanding General, a dumb hardheaded Minneapolis Yankee, who obviously flunked combat cartography and rudimentary wayfinding, only to toss his compass ironically into the latrine because it couldn’t keep the correct time, probably didn’t care that possibly some of the mothers and fathers of these same Japanese-American soldiers, were being detained in the Spinach Capital of the World internment camp at beautiful Crystal City, Texas. There is a big commemorative statue of Popeye in town as a tribute to the Spinach crops. But only a small plaque makes mention of the hapless inhabitants interred in the coldwater hooches of the prison camp. I’ll bet those same 230 Texians felt so especially anointed and downright thankful after they got home, that they sat right down to have a heaping mess kit full of Crystal City style weeviled rice and raw crappie served up on a bed of spinach with a tortilla just to pay their respects to someone greater than themselves.
In 1955, following a Popeye cartoon, the double feature, ‘Blackboard Jungle’ and ‘Running Wild’ played in Norman at the drive-in theatre. We all piled into MJ’s brother’s ’49 Ford and prepared ourselves at sundown to see the stark brutal truth about our lost generation that the blazing lobby cards depicted. I was there to see the lake roadster hot rods, Mamie’s pair of Van Dorens and listen to Bill Haley and the Comets rip it up. Unbelievably, Mitch Miller knocked ‘Rock Around the Clock’ off the billboard charts with his recording of ‘The Yellow Rose of Texas’. Miller was quoted as saying, “The reason kids like rock ‘n roll is their parents don’t.” Well, crap the bed, Mitch, no kids I knew liked Texas or their parents.
The 1950’s were, of course, the heyday of American automobile styling including phallic hood ornaments, bosom-like bumper bullets and vaginal grilles. My family had a 1955 Buick back in the day, and I always lovingly applied very special masseuse Simonize techniques to the chrome Van Dorens proudly fronting that hardtop Century. I remember whiling away late September afternoons in the classroom at school, listening to Miss Ima Loaner, a substitute teacher up from Bokhoma, who looked like she’d been around some, kind of like the five lines of a brothel limerick. As she droned on about the Texians and the Alamo, I began to notice various beginnings of the chrome auto fashion becoming de rigueur with a few of the girls in class. Their upper frontal torso topography, with the assistance of DuPont’s padded thermoplastic silky material, had budding Van Doren’s in training. Not the Big Mama Buick hammock uplift yet, but more like the little round puffettes similar to those sprouting on the ’55 Ford Thunderbird that had made its’ debut that year. Those skin tight Capri pants, scoop neck blouses, back to front cardigans and pointed circular conical shapes were more than enough to press our buibourethral glands from their preadolescent hibernation into action, or as it is referred to in the Texian Medical Journals, the preseminal Cowper’s moistness.
As aforementioned and according to Miss Loaner, Texians don’t seem to do so well when surrounded. The Yellow Rose of Texas that the song refers to, was a mulatto woman, a product of the Atlantic triangular trade, (that’s new Texan-speak for slavery) named Emily West, who seduced Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna allowing Sam Houston to catch the General with his tunic up and his tights down, and was able to win the battle of San Jacinto in mere minutes. The skirmish only took just a wee bit longer than the General’s reported hang time according to Ms. West. Why didn’t Colonel Travis just give Ms. Emmy a shout to begin with and save all that falderal at the Mission? All historical information indicates that a Texian blue norther had arrived; the Alamo defenders were short of clothing, unable to stay warm and had eaten all their dogs. Then, there’s that suggestively odd business with Travis, an attorney with a failed marriage, drawing a line in the sand and asking those willing to die for the Texian cause, to cross the line and stand very close to him. The, don’t ask, don’t tell, policy was still somewhat nebulous in 1836. A couple of things we do know from reliable accounts. Jim Bowie was sick of the entire thing, kept his backside to the wall and his hand on a damn big knife. Davy Crockett wore an animal on his head, escaped the bar-b-que, had a song written about him, and became a Santa Barbara wino.
I was probably madder than a crinoline draped Dallas debutante with an inopportune nuptial night hemorrhage, as I chucked my LB Butch Wax impregnated, faux coonskin cap, into OU’s Duck Pond, when I learned that Fess Parker had graduated from the University of Texas. I recall how that fetid fur wad, trailing an oily paraffin wake, resembled a putrid turncoat rat scrambling for its life, as I pumped some Daisy BBs into its’ beady glass eyes for good measure. And, in 1955, neither I, nor the ducks, gave two farts through a flintlock whether that treasonous appendaged chapeau was biodegradable. Hell, that cap could possibly still be lurking, soaking, as there are just some things that will even gag a crawfish.
In ’55, Harley Clark, the head cheerleader for the Texian University, supposedly invented the hook ‘em symbol. What isn’t widely known is there were three other cheerleaders who worked in concert with Harley in researching and developing the gesture that in some European countries means spousal infidelity or association with the devil. The remaining cheerleaders, Moe, Larry and Curly, had their original eye poke maneuver erroneously twisted way beyond its intended usage while Harley got all the accolades.
Speaking of 1955, Big Bertha, yet another big Texian noisemaker, was purchased from the University of Chicago in 1955 for a buck. Props to her, because she did get her genesis at the University of Chicago vs. Princeton football game back in ’22, and showed a lot of skin doing it. Strangely, she received a dose of radiation during the Manhattan Project in the 40’s while being stored under the school’s bleachers. Man. Those were some bleachers, eh? Every fan’s pucker parts that sat there must have been altered into a private array of iridescent wise cracks and curies. Of course, only a Texian booster would pay a dollar for a radioactive Yankee drum, then drag the damn thing into a stadium full of people.
And lastly, in the 1955 football game, OU won scoring 20 points, while the Texians decided not to score anything during the gridiron meeting. Coach Ed Price surreptitiously blamed their lackluster performance on the accumulative effects of radiation poisoning. In truth, and in addition to the team’s onset of the screaming shimmies, the Texian offense was obviously hampered by the continued use of Ed’s duck and cover plays when being rushed by Bud’s Boys.
Contemporarily, the Sooners haven’t won an OU-UT game since 2007. I blame this largely on the elimination of the requirement for our players to wear dosimeters when playing near Mack’s Roentgen’s Raiders. I mean, think about it. The half-life of that friggin’ drum has to be what, 7 trillion years?
In the Cotton Bowl, we’ll only have them halfway surrounded. So hopefully by intermission, the Texian fans will have poked each other’s eyes into their frontal sinuses or perhaps their ‘Eyes of Texas’ will be reduced to sightless topping garnishes for their overpriced nachos as they blindly seek the toilets, their seeping, overstretched bladders drizzling deep-fried Lone Star Beer.
At halftime, whether the Texian fanatics can actually see their boys, is then speculation. Nevertheless they’re always just like squinty-eyed Popeye, ‘they yam what they yam’, and the Texian Longhorns will have eaten their Crystal City spinach, exhibiting their girth of constant adulation, ready to do a Bluto on our rumps yet again if we ain’t ready.
Tribal loyalties being what they are, I believe I’ll carry the guidon for Oklahoma as I have for over a half century. I really have no idea as to the intensive game time pressures our players contend with, as I tend to hyperventilate and have panic attacks whenever I open fortune cookies. But in my assessment, a way to get that full, every game consistency for championship wins, is for all the rattle britches to eliminate whatever the football equivalent is of the yips and our valiant defense needs to have an adequate supply of bus tokens so everyone can show up at the game with a clue what to do when they get there. With that in mind then, I think we know which team will have the most Sashimi to clean up when it’s over.
Like bluesman Yank Rachell might have sung, “We gonna take de Amtrak and leave ‘em wid an ol’ Bevo to ride…”
GO SOONERS! BEAT TEXAS!