Swanky Conservative

Look for the run on canned food, bottled water, and gas cans to start by 5:00 p.m. tonight here in Austin. The official forecast track for tropical storm Dolly is now pointing at Brownsville.

Guess who’s back from the dead in the new season of 24?

Bill Bumgarner breaks down that wondrous spirit of the Southwest, Tequila. And no, that stuff with the worm in the bottom of it that we brought back from Mexico during Spring Break all those years ago doesn’t count.

(Related: the Mexican Martini)

Unbelievable what this new Moog guitar will do. It’s got infinite sustain and infinite mute available on all strings and all frets. Watch the vid below to see Lou Reed, Vernon Reid and more artists almost literally drool on the guitar while testing it out.

Big tip to the BlogFather.

It’s not the All Black, but it works. Trinity High School, in the Dallas-Fort Worth area, has a sizable Tongan population. The school’s football team adopted the haka as part of their pre-game rituals.

Voice of Tonga says, “Trinity’s Trojan football team legitimized the Haka at the high school level and within the State of Texas. Its a welcome addition to a team which made up of individuals with diverse background. Its symbolized a sense of unity with actions toward a common purpose.”

Rock on, guys.

Frank Sinatra’s got a new website. It’s hip, cool, and elegant.

Michelle Obama on 60 Minutes:

“I don’t lose sleep over it because the realities are that . . . as a black man . . . Barack can get shot going to the gas station,” Michelle Obama said in the interview, set to air Sunday night. “You can’t make decisions based on fear and the possibility of what might happen.”

Hillary Clinton on the campaign trail earlier today:

“My husband did not wrap up the nomination in 1992 until he won the California primary somewhere in the middle of June, right? We all remember Bobby Kennedy was assassinated in June in California. I don’t understand it,” she said, dismissing calls to drop out.

Which one caused ObaMSNBC’s slate of chattering boobs to pause from their kneeling position in front of the junior senator from Illinois to tut-tut the junior senator from New York?

D’oh! Obamessiah choked on his vast knowledge of foreign policy when speaking to the faithful hordes in Missouri:

Gatewaypundit has the video. MSNBC couldn’t be reached for comment because they were in the throes of continual Obamagasms.

Austin’s first red light camera will be online for the Memorial Day weekend. Meanwhile, other cities and places who’ve used the red light cameras aren’t so warm on them. The Austin American-Statesman reports,

One of the stories linked above talks about Dallas shutting off one-fourth of their cameras (pdf file) because the revenue isn’t enough to justify operating them. To Dallas’s credit, they’ve lengthened the yellow on many of those lights, as opposed to shortening them, as some red light camera operating cities have done.

I guess multiple stories of red light cameras being linked to increased accidents isn’t enough for the City of Austin’s Council to not go forth with these things. The city of Lubbock canceled its red light camera program because of an increase in rear-endings at intersections with the cameras. Psst, Austin, the Flatlanders are on to something, and the way Austinites drive around here, I don’t feel so good about this camera idea.

And the Republican Party, which hit bottom in 2006, has started digging again, instead of taking a breather, looking around at the party faithful, pissed off at the heading the GOP is taking - they’ve started digging again. I predict a Democratic Congress in 2009, and very likely a Democratic President. Is it John McCain’s attempt to out-Democrat the Democratic Party? A tactic used to some degree of success by President Bush, who didn’t lift his veto pen till half-way through his second term. Is it the inability to deal sensibly with illegal immigration, allowing the pro-illegal immigration voices to successfully spin the argument into one of being either for or against immigration (notice how the pertinent adjective ‘illegal’ gets left off much of the discussion)? Is it the presumptive Democratic Republican candidate for President being the survivor of a field that looked more like Walter Mondale Democrats?

Well, yeah. Those are damn good reasons to find comfort in throwing the lever in a November protest vote for Bob Barr, Libertarian candidate for President.

The clincher to many angry-as-hell Republicans is the announcement that the Republican National Convention will have tons of people walking around in Zubaz pants.

Fuck. (I’m a sailor, dammit. Let me slide this time.)

Not. Cool.

If you’re the Dude, then you get a pass. In fact, I better see people walking around the convention wearing bathrobes and carrying White Russians while wearing those godawful pants.

If not, shame, people. This aggression will not stand.

This weekend I’ll be doing my 3rd annual Texas MudBug Jamboree, otherwise known as my crawfish boil. It’s a blast and I thought I would share the recipe I use, handed down to me by a crawdad king from New Orleans. It’s Scott’s Swamp Bugs:

Scott’s Swamp Bugs

This is written for someone boiling 3 sacks of crawfish. Really now, if you’re doin’ less than that, you’re not doing something right.

Ingredients

• 18 stalks of celery cut into thirds
• 9 yellow onions cut into halves
• 9 green bell peppers cut into quarters
• 27 heads of garlic
• 36 small (smallest ones you can find) red, new potatoes
• 1 flagon of liquid boil
• 3 bag of swamp boil powdered mix
• 3 large canisters of salt
• 21 lemons cut in halves
• 6 pounds lil’ smokies or sausage
• 3 packages button mushrooms
• 30 small frozen corns ears
• ¾ cup Chinese red pepper mix
• 1 gallon white vinegar
• ice

Fill your pot(s) halfway or a bit more with water. Bring to a boil.

Once at rolling boil - add the celery, onions, bell peppers, garlic, potatoes

When water comes back to boil, let it go for about 5-6 minutes.

Following that, remove all veggies to a picking tray or large platter.

Put your cleaned crawfish into the cooking basket now, return basket to the water - and put all the veggies atop the crawfish. stir to mix up, and cover.

Check to watch when steam starts rising from the pot. at that point, your crawfish are starting to cook, and the boiling time is about to begin.

As it comes to a rolling boil add 1/3 flagon of liquid boil, then add 1 bag of swamp boil powdered mix. Stir, and set cover back on. Boil for 2-3 more minutes.

At this point, add 1/2 or more of 1 large canister of salt. Cut the fire, then add the lemons, lil’ smokies, mushrooms and corn.

Stir, and spike with a 1/4 cup of powdered chinese red pepper mix.
Now, add 1/4 of a flagon of regular, white vinegar, AND, top it all off with a few big scoops of ice. This along with the frozen corn, and refrigerated sausages all help lower
the water temp, and stop the cooking. Return the cover and let soak.

Check taste at 20 minutes. Add salt or additional spice to taste, and you’ll probably want to let soak longer. Taste again in 10-15 minutes. They’re probably done now, but let taste judge.

When you think they’re ready. pull em out, and let them sit in basket on the side on the pot for a sec to cool a bit and so the excess juice will run back to the pot, saving your table from the juice onslaught.

Save the water. You can use this for at least one more boil, probably 2.

For your second boil (if using the same pot):

Bring water to boil, repeat process with veggies, boil 5-6 minutes, add crawdads, return to boil, boil for 5 minutes, you’ll want to add more liquid boil - perhaps 1/4 of a flagon, maybe another 1/2 bag of swampfire, and salt to taste - best bet is to sip the water (let it cool first fellas, just scoop some into a cup, let it cool and dip some french bread in it to taste, or take a sip). If too salty, don’t add anymore.

Again, add lemons, sausage, shrooms, frozen corns, ice at the end. Cover and let soak. Repeat for a 3rd boil.

Have plenty of whole milk unsalted butter on the tables, plenty of saltine crackers - use this as a lil butter, a smack of smashed garlic, a crawfish tail - and bask in the delight of that lil creation of a dish.

Now you might ask, what do you use to actually do the boil? You need a large pot, a basket, and some heat.

My setup is the King Kooker 80 qt aluminum pot with basket. For the flame, I use their jet burner and propane for fuel. It’ll boil 50 quarts of water in 15 minutes easy.

You’ll want a metal washtub and a plastic basket with holes for washing off the bugs. A large laundry basket works well, as does something like a 60 quart plastic basket with holes in it. Dump the sack of crawfish into the basket, submerge most of them in the plastic tub and rock it back and forth to rinse them off. After they’re mostly clean, and you’ve removed any dead ones or non-crawfish items, you’re ready to cook ‘em.