Todd Sanders of Roadhouse Relics creates modern neon signs with the look of antiques, and he has kindly given permission for me to post this little clip of his piece called “Fireflies”:

The animated twinkling of the fireflies, the cool blue-green of the jar (just like an old Ball jar) — I loved this piece instantly when I drove past it the other day at dusk. The sign is five feet tall!  And dusk is the perfect time to see it, just like real fireflies.

And it turns out the piece has a pretty cool back-story, too: Sanders said he made this artwork and its twin for the wedding reception of country music stars Miranda Lambert and Blake Shelton, who got hitched May 14 at a ranch near Boerne. You can see one of the “Fireflies” signs glowing on the back left wall in this photo of the extremely funky-cool reception area, created by Junk Gypsy, designers based in Round Top. (And Aggies, whoop!)

The Junk Gypsy blog (which has many more gorgeous photos of the wedding setup) says the designers settled on a theme of “moonshine and mason jars, fireflies and pink guitars” to represent the couple. Sanders said the inspiration came from a Lambert song about treating love like fireflies in a jar — I think it must be her 2004 hit “Me and Charlie Talking”:

So you treat your love like a firefly,
like it only gets to shine for a little while
Catch it in a mason jar with holes in the top,
and run like hell to show it off

Junk Gypsy commissioned the neon works from him, then returned the pieces to him after the wedding, Sanders said. And thank goodness he put one up in his window for us to enjoy.

“I love them too,” Sanders said. “When I was a kid, we called them lightning bugs.”

Each of these two pieces is priced at $3,000, and even at that, I want to hang it in my living room where I could see it every day. Thank you, Mr. Sanders, for telling me about your artwork and letting me post the video, so others can see it twinkling too.

But as far as my own Mamma is concerned, she had plenty of reason to stitch it in the 1940s or 1950s, too, because her husband — my Pappa — was among the millions of Americans who fought in World War II, and she was among the millions more who waited nervously at home for news. My Pappa came home, to a long life, love and family, so he is not numbered among those for whom today is specifically set aside.

So I post this in memory of his friends who did not come home, and their fellow service members, men and women, who did not come home in all our wars and actions, in peacetime, in training for combat, from jungles and beaches and motor pools and hospitals and dirt roads and blown-out towns, in ships and planes and helicopters and trucks, in the air, on land and sea.

thank you all.

Fightin’ Texas Aggie Class of 1994!

This image, a daguerreotype, was made in late 1850, right around his 15th birthday. The next year, he would start work at his brother Orion’s newspaper, the Hannibal Courier.

University of California Press; thisismarktwain.com

No mustache. No thought of a white suit. A smooth face with what might be freckles (his hair would have been red), the narrowed right eye adding an air of skepticism, as it would in his later portraits. (The photo is reversed – more on that in a minute.)

And if one is hesitant to seem fanciful by saying the boy’s eyes are windows into a clever and original mind, the literal proof is at the bottom of the image, where his hands clutch printer’s letters spelling out his own name: “SAM.”

He’s holding a compositor’s stick in which he has “set the letters in reverse so that they would read correctly when the daguerreotype produced a mirror image,” explains the Steamboat Times, which also says the hat is a printer’s cap.

Though his “splendid shock of red hair” is white in our collective consciousness, he was not only a redhead himself but surrounded all his life by red hair (his mother, his daughter), as well as cats, and so may be uniquely qualified to observe, as he did, that

“While the rest of the species is descended from apes, redheads are descended from cats.”

The photo comes from Thisismarktwain.com, a web site built by the University of California Press in advance of its release of the unexpurgated version of his autobiography — he didn’t want it to be published until 100 years after his death, which came in 1910. So it’s time! The first volume will come out Nov. 15.

Expanded capabilities: As you can see, the latest upgrades of the Guide include the ability to control nearby Nutri-Matic dispensers and several settings that allow it to work in tandem with your shipboard computer. Most importantly, the latest Guide relieves you of the need to carry a separate Sub-Etha Sens-o-Matic, incorporating as it now does a lighted indicator of Sub-Etha reception plus a Thumb switch. Hitchhikers everywhere can now complain along with everyone else about how many bars they’re getting or not getting.

Safety and comfort features: When events become overwhelming you can now adjust the Perspective in your immediate vicinity to something a little more comfortably self-centered, or opt to “grey out” perception of the immediate future and its dangers by toggling Temporal Focus.*

The Guide’s latest edition also incorporates the mind-bogglingly successful “Somebody Else’s Problem” Field, which renders troublesome objects completely invisible with a flick of the switch.

And while the Guide’s location sensors are as powerful and accurate as ever, we realize that the modern hitchhiker may not always wish their exact location to be known. Thus we have added a Location obfuscator, which not only hides the user’s current position but actually represents the hitchhiker as being at another location, the randomness and distance of which are adjustable. In beta testing, our field researchers pronounced this their favorite feature.

Touch technology: While the expanded feature set has not reduced what some reviewers have called the “insanely complicated” appearance of the Guide, we have by popular demand retained the original message, so calming to generations of hitchhikers: “Don’t Panic.” Even these large friendly letters are improved, however, as you will see they are now raised in a smooth embossed plastic that is not only soothing to pet and stroke but also osmotically releases low-level endorphins.

* Note: These functions bear no similarity to products of the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation and any suggestion to the contrary will be dealt with by our large and rapaciously effective legal department.

Graphic design by Sue Owen offered in tribute to Douglas Adams, who would have had the first iPad out of the box. He’d have loved it, wouldn’t he?

Short link for this entry: http://bit.ly/guidecover

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Actually, I went yesterday. But I wanted to get a photo of the San Jacinto battle flag, which I’m already at work making into one of my Texian Tees.  (Here’s a photo that’s better — or at least more brightly lit — than the one I got.)  It’s a good thing I went, though, because just a few hours later, I learned that the House chambers, where the flag hangs, will soon be closed until November as part of renovations to the Capitol.

I always love visiting the Capitol, and I particularly like it when there are schoolkids going through:

Half of ‘em with their faces tilted back, looking up into the dome. This is what they’re seeing:

And I didn’t notice till I was going through my film that the star design way up there at the tippy-top is the star from the (disputed) De Zavala flag.  Which fact I’ve of course now retconned into the sales pitch for my De Zavala flag T-shirt! A lovely shirt in very soft navy-blue cotton; I’m wearing mine right now, in fact.

Yet mark’d I where the bolt of Cupid fell:

It fell upon a little western flower,

Before milk-white, now purple with love’s wound,

And maidens call it Love-in-idleness.

– A Midsummer Night’s Dream

This is the lovely Viola cornuta, a modern cousin of the deep purple violet Shakespeare knew and used in his play — Puck squeezes the juice from this flower on the young Athenians’ eyes to make them fall in love with the first person they see upon waking. “Shakespeare’s Flowers” identifies the plant as Viola tricolor, or Johnny jump-ups, a vibrant little violet-and-gold thing.  But doesn’t that description just fit?  Milk-white, with an infusion of lavender blue.

There are many shades in the “Sorbet” viola line — this one, I think, is “Coconut Swirl.” But I dislike that name (partly because I hate coconut) and think it should be called “Blackberry Cobbler,” after the single best ice cream I’ve ever tasted.  Much more fitting.  These are blooming now in every pot around my house — I can’t get enough of them.

I’ve lived here and loved here. Two-stepped and swung here. Cheered Buck Owens’ birthday here. Seen the Calexico horn section nearly fall off the tiny stage packed with Mavericks and los Super Seven here. Loaned out my drivers license so a friend could rent a portable bar here. Pondered the dusty disco ball; played some pool; ran into a 7th-grade algebra classmate here. Fixed my lipstick in the mirror here. In weirder moments, eaten breakfast here, watched the “rat highway” in the back here, rung in the New Year with Mojo Nixon here. Been a barfly regular for Toni Price, Redd Volkaert, the Blues Specialists here. Talked with Danny Roy Young about Texas music in the 1960s here.
Left my car here.
Left my heart here.
Left my credit card here.

Love this sign; it’s out near the ranch. Covered (I hope only covered) with one of those vinyl signs now, blech. Not before I got a photo though.  If you look close that’s definitely Lyndon’s nose.

The Coupland Dance Hall, a wonderful old building chock full of history, which was where I asked to go for my birthday in 2011. This particular Saturday night the crowd was small because of predicted hailstorms in the area, and also I waited for a moment when the dancefloor was pretty empty to snap this, because I liked the star light pattern on the floor. One room over, the restaurant serves real good meals; one floor up, they’ve turned former bordello rooms into an inn where you can stay

The greatest word in the entire world. In New Orleans’ Central Business District, these brass insets mark the streetcorners. And if it’s a lovely soft overcast day in January, you can smell the scent of sweet olives drifting over from the Quarter.

Hickory burger no onions, please. With a fountain Dr Pepper and a side of beans. (Ate here so often in high school that I didn’t have to say it — I just walked in and the cook said, “Hey there, hickory burger no onions!”) On the south side of the courthouse square in Denton, Texas, the best damn town anywhere.

A bunch of grocery store roses; snapped actually in the parking lot of the grocery store as a cloud scudded across a bright sunny sky.

A holy well in the Irish countryside that we came upon unexpectedly during a ramble that resembled altogether too closely the story in “McCarthy’s Bar” that ends, “Have ya fallen and hurt yourself, or are ye just afraid of the cow?” Bovines notwithstanding, this was very much the coolest moment on our trip

Hilltop in Tuscany

Farm in County Galway. We had a picnic here, with the sheeps.

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