On boots and bars and motorbikes...

Weeklong songwriting retreat for veterans to host first in-person event since pandemic By BOBBY HORECKA , Managing Editor,  Lavacian: Lavaca County Farm & Home , Fall 2022 Published in Hallettsville, Texas, USA, Nov. 1, 2022 We lined up the vehicles getting ready for war just like we’d done 1,000 times before we talked about the mission and what could go wrong no matter what would happen we would stay Army strong…   Staff Sgt. Bobby Henline, in country in Afghanistan Bobby Henline has a knack for making people laugh, though you’d hardly expect it, just to look at him. Mainly because the retired Staff Sergeant always had such a serious look about him, even before the U.S. Army got ahold of him. It continues to be one of his most disarming features, a look he’s mastered as he makes his rounds on stages the world over. Not long before he left the Army, Henline was challenged by a friend to try his hand at comedy. He signed up for an open-mic night, and later, kept at his craft near w

Ask folks where our national anthem got its start, and most are quick to point at a man named Francis Scott Key, a lawyer by trade. Not just any ol’ lawyer, either. He became the federal prosecutor for Washington, D.C., a prestigious post, indeed. Came complete with a Presidential nomination and everything. That Andrew Jackson was a longtime friend mattered little because he’d earned his chops the old-fashioned way, case by case. He was good, too. Quite the grizzly in the courtroom, by all accounts. He built a reputation for not only accepting some of the toughest cases around but usually landing the most favorable outcomes for his clients. Still, no matter how impressive he might be in an argument, Key wouldn’t be most folks first choice as songwriter. Not for something as grand in scale as a nation’s anthem, anyway. Apart from legal briefs, he wasn’t a writer of any real merit. He might’ve dallied some with verse, but poet laureate he was not. Nor was he a composer of grand musical s

Surfing the state and national headlines last weekend I happened upon a word I’d never seen before, applied to squirrels, of all things, all over Texas. Curious, I clicked the headline, which carried me to a story, written originally for the San Antonio Express News but republished in the Houston Chronicle, about how in this miserable oven setting otherwise known as “today’s temperature” – a weather anomaly that’s been with us for half of 2022 now – even the squirrels were employing an all-new method of beating the heat. They called it “splooting” and because I’ve never a big fan of squirrels (tree rats, mostly) and this sounded something like a child might tell Mom after she hears a loud boom from some back corner of the house (as in “I didn’t do nuthin: It just sploded, all by itself”), I eagerly clicked ahead to the image gallery. To my disappointment, none involved any rodents spontaneously combusting (though that would’ve been kinda cool, you gotta admit). Rather, it showed

Hearing about all the words that get added to a language has become almost commonplace in our world of social media, Wikipedia and mile upon mile of online apps and spellcheckers that make things like a big, fat, well-worn dictionary almost a thing of the past. Which is sad, really. I’ll probably be buried with mine (to make I sure something heavy keeps me from wandering off, no doubt). Because along with helping you know when to use role vs. roll and provide handy definitions, there’s truly no end to many uses a good dictionary comes in handy with. Like leveling a sofa, perhaps, one that’s missing one of those footie jobbers underneath, or chucking at varmints that always seem to wind up in places they shouldn’t. They’re make swell booster seats/step stools for toddlers. And I can’t think of a better tool to employ when waking that snoozing student who’s about to miss the best part of your lecture. What’s far less common then even dictionary users are the lists of words that nob