A lot of people love bacon. Maybe no one more-so than comedian Jim Gaffigan. Texas Standard commentator WF Strong says Gaffigan’s bacon commitment might make him a good candidate for a honor this weekend in a Texas city you’ve likely never heard of.
Episodes
October 3, 2018
Texans Have A Funny Relationship With The Letter ‘R’
Texas Monthly once described the joke I’m about to tell you as THE TEXAS JOKE because of its staying power over many decades: A married couple from out of state were driving across Texas and saw a sign that said “Mexia 22 miles.” They got into a bit of an argument over how to say […]
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September 19, 2018
About a month ago, my son went off to college with my Jeep, and I needed to get another vehicle. I had been truckless for a few years – a rare condition in my life – and I decided I wanted to fix that right away. For a long time, I had wanted a King […]
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September 5, 2018
They other day I was looking over a list of those who died at the Alamo. The one thing that struck me about the list was that the men who gave their lives there were, collectively, incredibly young. I saw John Wayne’s film, “The Alamo,” when I was a kid and for years I had […]
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August 8, 2018
By W. F. Strong Tom Hanks in the movie “Cast Away” was stranded all alone on a deserted pacific island. He was the lone survivor of a plane crash. The seriousness of his situation sunk in as he did the math in his head. He explained radial geometry to Wilson (his Volleyball friend) as he […]
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July 12, 2018
The Armadillo’s Texas Roots Reach Back To Ancient Times
On these warm summer nights, I see them often as I drive home on FM 803. They sometimes stop, frozen for a few seconds, their eyes reflecting my headlights in an eerie red – and then they dash off into giant clumps of prickly pear, where predators can’t follow. The Spaniards named them armadillos – […]
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June 27, 2018
Pink Cadillacs And Lucky 13: How Mary Kay Ash Built A Billion-Dollar Business
We have had dozens of rags-to-riches stories in Texas. These Horatio Algers had hardscrabble beginnings but built fortunes worth hundreds of millions and even billions of dollars. But unfortunately – at this point, anyway – most of them have been male. So the women who did it were all the more impressive because they had […]
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June 13, 2018
What Anthony Bourdain Knew About Mexico
Like millions of his fans, I was stunned to learn that Anthony Bourdain had left us so soon last week. I was sad because he had such a genius for expressing his brilliance: and, I believe, had so much more to teach. I’ve spent half my life trying to teach students at the university to […]
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May 30, 2018
Where Have All The Horny Toads Gone?
A couple of weeks ago I read a book called “The Lion the Living Room,” which was about how our domestic cats are just little lions. I thought, ‘that’s nothing. I grew up with dinosaurs in the alley.’ They looked for all the world like little dinosaurs – at least to us kids they did. […]
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