DOYLEISM OF THE DAY: “Nothing sucks more than the moment you realize you were wrong during a heated argument.”

I just got back from Texas again. It’s like stepping into another world when I get there. The economy is thriving and the people are optimistic, quite a far cry from the doom and gloom you hear around Vegas. The oil wells, wind farms, dairy farms, cattle ranches and cotton and peanut farms seem to make the residents of West Texas have plenty of money. that translates into successful restaurants, shops, banks, etc. We tend to live in our own small part of the world and we just forget just how big our planet is.

Because I came from the farming country, I found some interesting changes. When I was young we used to watch the skies praying for rain to enable our cotton to grow. We had to fight boll weevil, lice, rabbits that ate the cotton, etc. We had to spray the cotton, chop the weeds out of it, then harvest it by hand. Today’s farmers have a new strain of cotton that eliminates the weevils and lice completely. They spray the young cotton one time which kills all the weeds. Most of the farms are irrigated and harvested mechanically. In the meantime, a single tractor can cost upward of $250,000. Farmers have to have lots of crops to afford all the machinery they have to buy.

Another interesting thing was as I was driving away from the Midland-Odessa airport, I could see hundreds of cars parking in a giant field. They were having a huge three-day concert by a group of rockers called Rock the Desert. I googled them and they play Christian rock music. Lots of Christian folks down in Texas, again a far cry from the majority of young people around Vegas.

My sister had just gotten a cast off her broken arm when I arrived. She had fallen on her patio and snapped the bone. I think falling is one of the primary dangers in older poeple’s lives. Puggy Pearson got up to go to the bathroom, slipped and hit his head, killing him. My old golfing buddy, Fred Barnes from Mobile, fell backward going up some steps, killing himself instantly. I saw a boy from Amarillo who told me Amarillo Slim had fallen down a flight of stairs, breaking 5 ribs. I know my crutch has saved me many times.

Nothing much to do in Andrews, TX so I watched a lot of TV.  While I was there I watched a couple things I had no idea about on 60 Minutes. turkey is 90% Muslim (I googled it and 98% profess the Islamic faith) and has mosques everywhere where they go to pray 5 times a day. If the current trend continues, Muslims will control the world in just over 1/2 a century.

The other thing that amazed me was that our country spends 55 billion dollars a year on terminally ill people during the last two months of their lives. Even if the patients in a hospital have a clause in their will or living trust (as I have) about declining any use of life support, the money is spent giving almost useless tests from head to toe. Good Googa Mooga! I know I won’t die tied down to some hospital bed hooked up to some machine.

I’d like to thank the hundreds, maybe thousands, of people that wished me Happy B-day on Facebook and Twitter. I ran out of room on Twitter trying to read the messages and my e-mail overflowed with messages on my wall from Facebook. I was surprised at the  number of folks that had the same birthday as mine. Even though I remember the old gambler/con man Titanic Thompson used to have all sorts of proposition bets about that. I believe if you take 22 random people you are a big favorite to find two with the same birthday. I’m pretty sure if you take 50 random people you will find one that has your B-day. Titanic had other props but I’m not sure what the B-day props were. Anyway, I know my lucky number has always been 7 and now I have a pair of 7′s to draw to

-DB