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dcbc

Certifiably Surly
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Everything posted by dcbc

  1. As someone who generally avoids "the news" these days, I had higher hopes for Surly as a source.
  2. So apparently, he's still alive.
  3. I agree that the Departed gets better upon rewatch(es). Goodfellas still is the greatest, although I love Godfather (1&2).
  4. We'll all be eating old gym mats and drinking malk by then.
  5. I think I read "on hold for 30 days," which likely is a not.
  6. Either way, so long as it's toxic to manufacture and terrible for the environment.
  7. Nothing like a petroleum-based wardrobe during a hot Texas summer.
  8. He was 63 when I was born. My sister and I talk about how we (11 years apart) got different versions of both of our parents. He was definitely around more when I was a kid than with any of my siblings who got him while in full career mode.
  9. Well, then I go and copy-pasta it. If it's any consolation, the Houston Chronicle messed up my dad's obit. Instead of his place of birth being listed as Deadwood, SD, they wrote Deadhead. We actually got a chuckle out of that one.
  10. "Somos millonarios.”
  11. Nobody say a damned, untoward word about South Austin's HOT mom on this thread. @South Austin Did you fish with your kids? I grew up fishing with my dad, but I wasn't very good at it. My wife's dad instilled a love of fishing in my kids, and I've fished with them occasionally, but even though I kept my dad's rods and his tackle box, I really don't do it anymore and I think my father-in-law was a perfectly suitable fishing-mentor for them. And despite the fact that I grew up hunting with my dad, and it was a great way to bond with him, I don't hunt anymore. My wife remarked yesterday that our kids have never been hunting, which was so different than both she and I, who grew up doing it. My kids' high school has a bass-fishing team, and my son is losing his tennis doubles partner to it next year. I guess that one inherited a love of tennis, and the other one got my love of music. I may have had a point when I started writing that, but I lost my way.
  12. Good luck, brutha. Grow an extra finger. It'll help
  13. 9/2488 popped up on Youtube. It's good, but in a really off way. I dig it.
  14. I had such low expectations. But this is funny as hell.
  15. Sometimes, you gotta show a little leg to get out of that ticket.
  16. Well, it slowed down a little bit, so I'll add something. So I've mentioned that my dad was an accomplished, private pilot. He did not serve in the military. He wanted to enlist after Pearl Harbor, but his business partners convinced him he could do more good building pipelines and refineries in the US than he could getting shot down over the Pacific. So he stayed stateside and spent a lot of weekends flying officers from base to base. When he finally hung it up, he had over 10,000 hours. His last flight was in the early 80s. He was flying back from Eagle, CO. One of my half-brothers and the rest of the hunting buddies were in the cabin getting loaded. Toward the end of the flight, my brother yells toward the cockpit, "C.B., when are you gonna start riding back here and enjoying the good life with the rest of us?" As my dad told the rest of the story, "So after that, I greased the runway at Andrau one last time, and I hung it up." Just as well, probably. The O&G market went to crap a few years later, and the company sold the plane. But I got curious a couple of years ago about that plane. Turns out, its last recorded flight (with a repower and a new livery over the years) departed from Switzerland in 2002). I eventually found it mothballed in Egypt. The apparent lesson is don't break down in Cairo. It was a cool plane. in the late 70s. Pueblo, CO. We look like a Wes Anderson movie. I have his parka still. It's the best. Switzerland 2002 Cairo
  17. Are you guys going to dress up like the "great looking chicks" in the Lambo? You know, just in case you get pulled over?
  18. It's on my bucket list. He loved Buenos Aires. Here's a picture on one of his stops on the way down. The kids in town were all in for the photo-op.
  19. My dad had a favorite joke. He used to tell it with some regularity. My mom always rolled her eyes, but he loved it and kind of liked that she was sick of hearing it. When I was a kid, I asked him to tell it and recorded him on an old Panasonic tape recorder. I wish like hell I still had that tape. I've got one old video where you can hear his voice. I swear, the man gargled with gravel. Fast forward (no pun intended). My mom remarried in the early 2000s. During their marriage, her then-husband finished and self-published his autobiography for his family and loved ones. It was so interesting and helped me get to know him better. A few years later, my mom wrote and published her own, and it is priceless, not only for her story, but for part of my dad's as well. I've only read it once---I read it once to my older son a little each night at bedtime. I barely made it through the part about my dad's passing. I tried to get her to make an audiobook so I could have a recording of her voice. But the voicemails I saved will have to do as her health started to deteriorate around that time. Anyway, I really came to appreciate that joke over the years. I'm of the mind that everyone should know two jokes, a dirty one, and a clean one. I don't know if he had a dirty one, thought he used to have a bunch of inappropriate diddies he'd sing from time to time. I've adopted his joke as my clean one. It goes There's this fellow. He's on a business trip. He checks into the hotel. As he's checking in, he asks, where can a man get a drink around here. The maître d' tells him, "Oh, the hotel has a beautiful rooftop bar. Just take the elevator to the top floor. So the man goes to his room, unpacks, and heads up to the roof to see this bar. He gets off the elevator and this bar is really something; you can see the whole city. He goes up to the bar, pulls up next to the only other guy there, and orders a drink. As he sips his drink, he looks around and asks the bartender, "Say, anybody ever have a few too many and stumble over the side. The other guy at the bar pipes up, "It's really something, there's and air-vent system that can sense when someone falls over the side, and if that happens, it'll kick on and pop 'em right back on the roof." "Get out of here," the businessman replies. "No, really, I'll show you," the man says as he walks toward the edge of the rooftop. Then, he steps off the side, and a second later, like magic, he pops right back up onto the rooftop, and ambles back over to the bar. "I've got to try this!" the businessman explains as he hurries over to the edge. He steps off the roof, and plummets to his death. The bartender takes his drink and begins wiping off the bar with a towel. He looks at the man sitting at the bar, shaking his head, and says, "Superman, what do you do those kinds of things?" And that, is my dad's "Superman Joke."
  20. Here's what I found. It doesn't appear to be the same ones in that link. "In 1957, the [company] went international by constructing an 1100-mile natural gas pipeline in South America from the Bolivian border to Buenos Aires, Argentina. The Argentina pipeline led to another . . . project, which was the engineering and construction of an Argentine petrochemical complex. This complex used the new raw materials brought by the pipeline for the first synthetic rubber plant in South America in a cooperative undertaking called PASA."
  21. Well, I know what I'm going to try to figure out this weekend.
  22. Thanks for starting this. I imagine I'm not going to get this done in one post. So this is just the intro about my dad: He was born in 1910, in Deadwood, SD. No, Armybrat and I were not classmates; I'm a product of his second wife in 1973. His dad was a sharecropper. He had four brothers and sisters and they were dirt-poor. He never talked to me about his dad, and what I do know are just tidbits I picked up. Among those was that he was the quarterback for his high school football team, but he had to quit his senior year to get a job to support his family. The coach tried to get him to stay and he always felt guilty about quitting. He never went to college, and his dad told him he never would amount to anything; no wonder I never heard a word about him from my dad. He went out west and was working for a surveyor in California building highways. One of his jobs, as he recalled it, was leaving hundred dollar bills by some of the surveying stakes. He later realized those were bribes. He moved on to Denver at some point and was working as an engineer. He was self-taught. During that period of time, he took flying lessons and eventually got a pilot's license. In the 1940s, he moved to Houston with some people/engineers he worked with in Denver. They set up a table and a phone at a trade fair and landed their first contract. That little project grew into a large petroleum engineering and construction firm that built all sorts of oil and gas infrastructure all over Texas, the United States, and parts of South America. Among those was a pipeline in Buenos Aires. He previously had purchased a Beechraft Twin Bonanza, which later was upgraded to an Excalibur (engines and avionics). He always was so proud of the fact that he flew that plane over the Andes mountains to Argentina during that project. He told me stories about circling small towns before landing on dirt roads in South America. The business partner and namesake of the company was in declining health and retired in 1957. My dad took over. His partner gave him a silver box upon his departure. On it is inscribed in his handwriting, "[DCBC, Sr.] keep her flying, boy!" That box is on a table in my office. Some framed, Gaucho, water-color paintings he brought back from Argentina, which hung in his office, now adorn a wall in my office. He and his first wife had three boys during the 1940s. They divorced in the late 1950s and, after a short stint as a bachelor, he met my mother, thirty years younger than he, on a blind date in 1960. My mom was a dance instructor and former Miss Houston runner up who had assumed the title after it was discovered that the winner was dating one of the judges. She swore she never would marry a man who drank (my grandad enjoyed it quite a bit). My dad ordered a Cutty and Water at dinner. He must have made a good impression because she dropped that caveat in a hurry. They married later that year. My sister was born in 1962. During the 60s, they bought a small ranch near Sealy and, over time, it grew into a pretty big horse and cattle hobby for him. My mom always wanted to move out there, but he emphatically told her, "I was born on the farm. I have no intention of dying on the farm." In 1968, his company purchased a Jet Commander 1121, which he learned to fly. And boy, did he love flying that plane. I have a distinct memory of being maybe two or three years old and being summoned to the cockpit. He popped me up on his lap and I could see the clouds race by. He put my hand on the yoke and said, "You're flyin'!" I asked which way I should go, and he told me, "Straight ahead will be just fine." It was on autopilot. When I was fourteen, I started taking flying lessons, and he, now, age 78, was pumped. He drove me out to the postage-stamp-sized airpark west of Houston regularly and we'd talk about airplanes and flying I now realize he knew he probably didn't have a lot of years left. By the time, I soloed, cancer had caught up with him. He was bedridden, but I got to tell him about this milestone and he mustered a hell of a smile for me. I still carry that smile with me. Two weeks later, he was gone. I wrote a college essay about our relationship and my learning to fly that opened a lot of doors for me academically. We spent every weekend at that ranch, which by then had grown quite a bit. We hunted and fished a lot. There was a pond with a paddle boat. We never stocked it, but it had so many bass in it, you'd swear it was farmed. If he was fishing with me, I'd never get a bite. But I'd get to reel in some that he'd hook. He only used on lure: The Famous Hula Popper. He caught so many fish. There also were a metric ton of water moccasins in and around that pond. And he also kept his Remington Model 1100 .410 in the boat to dispatch them when they expressed too much interest in the fish on the stringer. A fellow Surlyite now owns that gun, and I hope it's being put to good use. He was an avid deer hunter, and I still have a ton of firearms (several I will never part with). He and his buddies and my older brothers used to go up to a huge ranch a friend of his owned in Eagle, Colorado and hunt mule deer and elk every October. When I was 15, I finally got to go. They'd always eat lunch in this beautiful, little valley they called "the pocket." One day, after lunch, my dad spotted a bull elk on the ridge above a shale slide and took him. He then walked up the road that led to the ridge while we cleaned up lunch. The next thing I know, I'm standing in the pocket with one of my half-brothers, looking up, as my dad slides off the ridge and slides down that shale slide dragging that elk behind him by the rack. My brother looked up and said, "Son of a bitch, he's 79 years old! What the hell." In later years, my half-brother would go hunting there every October. He always told me he felt closest to my dad in the pocket. On year, they were there. He said it was just the most still day, bluebird skies. And he said something about my dad. I don't know if he was telling a story or talking to him or what. But he said, all of a sudden, out of the stillness, the leaves all around them, just swirled up into the air. He'd never said anything like this to me before. But that really meant something to him. Anyway, that's the short version. He died over 34 years ago, and I think about him every day. In his eulogy, the pastor (his golfing buddy), called him "The Turk of Manly Men." He most certainly was that, but he was a whole lot more.
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