A Year in Lubbock: Housing
Dan Hillman
approximately ten miles across, and filled with more Christians than you
could shake your pecker at, even if you stood up in the passenger seat
of a convertible and waggled while someone else drove. This is Lubbock.
The egg shape is The Loop, a four-lane highway that surrounds Lubbock
and provides a place for folks in pickups and Cadillacs to doze away
their golden years at ten miles below the speed limit.
Lubbock is a charitable kinda town. Last December, one of the Star!
Football! Players! (TM Catherine Elkins) and his buddies were in a
pickup truck idling at a stoplight when Our Hero decided that he didn't
like the looks of the fellows in the next car. Being a sterling example
of a sound mind in a sound body, he yelled "faggot" at them several
times. When the light turned green the fellows threw something into the
back of the pickup and took off. Angered, the buddies chased them,
rammed the car with the truck, lost control, and then hit something more
solid. Hospitalized for months, it was reported that Our Hero is
paralyzed from the chest down and probably will be for life. Tax-free
contributions to this hero's therapy may be made at several local banks.
Strangely, the circumstances of the accident didn't get a lot of air
time with the local news.
Although it has been rumored that I considered calling Our Hero's
hospital room at various hours of the night to serenade him with a
chorus of "whatsamatter, faggot, can't drive?" I deny the accusation.
That would be mean spirited, generally un-Christian, and surely a
one-way ticket to the Land of the Damned, which, now having spent a year
in Lubbock, I can appreciate all the more. As a neighbor's bumper
sticker says: "Eternity: Smoking or Non?"
Just outside The Loop, toward the southwest, is a housing development
called LakeRidge. I specify the name because Lubbock is defined by
developments named after things that don't exist. Most towns have
natural features that make certain places desirable. A river view, a
hill, a lake, or maybe a beach. Not here. Lubbock and most of West Texas
is effectively an unpaved parking lot. As the locals say, "We don't like
to have all of those trees and mountains and things get in the way of
our scenery." (The ObChattel and I figure we can stand to hear that
about a dozen more times before we come out shooting.) In Lubbock,
developers buy a bunch of land and decide if the houses are going to be
expensive or cheap. Based on their decision, one has the potential to
live in a swanky place or a hovel. But regardless of the decision, the
developers are still building on the same parking lot, which they try to
disguise in the more expensive areas by planting mature trees and giving
developments countrified names such as Pheasant Run and Whisperwood, in
places which have neither pheasants nor woods.
When the ObChattel and I came out here for house hunting last year, we
learned all of this stuff and more. Much more. House hunting is a
wonderful pretense for snooping around other peoples' houses and seeing
how others live, or, more precisely, how they'd like you to think that
they live. In Lubbock, it seems the way others aspire to live is by
aping the covers of magazines one sees in the supermarket checkout line.
The kindliest conclusion I can draw is that the big-haired (but
good-hearted) folks around here find their decorating schemes in
magazines like *Country Shit* and come up with a diabolical mix of
Victoriana and Kuntry Kute.
This is the land of the couch covered with dolls in Victorian costume.
These are the houses containing nooks with tableaux of dolls sitting in
little chairs surrounded by brass deer. These are the rooms containing
beige wall-to-wall carpet, ceilings of spray-applied texture, the
thimble collection in the curio cabinet, and the display of
look-don't-touch china in the hutch. Conversely, some houses tried for
the "everything must be white or gold or mirrored and don't you dare
leave fingerprints" effect. There was one house where everything was
white. White carpet. White bedspread with white embroidery. A white
fireplace that had never witnessed the burning of anything other than
natural gas. A mounted poster of a white horse galloping across clouds.
Most sterile.
There were human touches, of course. Every house seemed to contain the
same wedding pictures of a "blonde" woman next to a dark-haired guy.
These pictures appeared with such similarity and regularity that I
suspected they were supplied by the developers. Tidy stacks of *TV
Guide* and *People* magazine served as (the sole) proof that the
occupants of the houses could read. And Jesus, was there Jesus shit
*everywhere*! In total, we looked at 21 houses (sorry, "homes") in
Lubbock and only one of them lacked any sort of crucifix/Jesus loves
Your Name Here/inspirational items. Between the many inspirational
plaques and lousy drivers one wouldn't be surprised to learn that
Lubbock is populated solely by recovering alcoholics.
The tenth house we saw, neither of us hated, so we bought it. Yes, it
had Jeezoid stuff. What's more, the owners home-schooled, so what is now
our dining room was decorated with textbooks, a blackboard, and a big
alphabet banner proclaiming that A is for Adam, the first man, J is for
Jesus, who died for our sins, and so on. (The ObChattel is annoyed that
she forgot to see what X is for.)
Anyhow, what is now our house is in LakeRidge. To be more precise, the
paperwork declares that we live in LakeRidge Country Club Estates. There
is a country club two blocks away, to which we don't belong, and there's
a small man-made body of water which the country club calls a lake, the
ObChattel calls a pond, and which is, according to our neighbor the
civil engineer, actually a glorified drainage ditch. There isn't a
ridge, unless one counts the artificial hills on the golf course.
Although we didn't know it when we bought the house, LakeRidge is
considered by the locals to be a fancy-schmancy place to live. A while
ago an article in the local rag, the *Lubbock Avalanche-Journal* (a
strangely named paper for a place where an avalanche couldn't possibly
occur) identified LakeRidge as, God help me, "[o]ne of Lubbock's more
upscale residential areas." Keeping in mind that one *can* buy a house
with land within city limits for under $15,000, "more upscale" damns
with faint praise. There are several places in Lubbock where real estate
costs more. However, having read a few of the *A-J*'s fawning articles,
I suspect the *A-J* is managing to confuse "upscale" with "gaudy."
Ya see, although technically the house is in LakeRidge (sorry, "UPscale
LakeRidge"), we live on the cheap side of the development. Our house
would be considered fairly normal and unpretentious in most suburbs.
However, if you go two blocks south, you enter the realm of grandiose
poncitude where a plethora of bad architecture lends support to the
recovering alcoholic theory.
This part of LakeRidge features taste-defying combinations of columns,
arches, shutters, tiles, 12-pane windows, and, for one nearly completed
house, a studded wooden front door reinforced with iron straps. An
impossibly neat pseudo-colonial is across the street from a post-modern
California concrete bomb shelter. A Greek temple complete with columns
and statuary of nymphs and satyrs sits next to a sort of Mediterranean
Chateau du Drug Lord.
These are houses for Trump-like vulgarians, genteel souls who admire the
refined taste and urbanity of Las Vegas. Many of these houses boast
gigantic Palladian windows, seemingly designed to reveal the goings-on
of the entire house ("Oooh, somebody's coming downstairs for another
piece of chocolate cake!"), an effect more suited to the lobby of a
midtown-Manhattan office building than the front door of a two-story
house.
An oft-used architectural detail among the LakeRidge vomigensia is the
pseudo-leaded-glass look. Here a normal pane of glass is scored with
diagonal lines to appear to be many small diamond panes held together
with leading. Forgetting that the days of leaded glass were over long
before anyone lived in Lubbock and forgetting that any examination under
a light source would reveal that the individual panes are too perfectly
aligned to be authentic, anyone who's ever seen the real thing would
know immediately that this glass was horribly, blatantly, laughably
phony.
One quaint example of this is the house with front doors in which the
bottoms are solid and unornamented and the tops are large rectangles of
that "leaded" glass. They're presumably meant to look "classy," but in
fact they look like security doors with wire glass, as seen in any
inner-city high school or rehab center. In some houses the entire
front-door Palladian arch will be filled with this glass, giving the
appearance of a rather large chicken coop.
Another popular architectural theme is the use of red brick and white
concrete in bizarre and unnatural combinations, creating a foul brew of
Moorish, Spanish, French, modern, and colonial architecture. There are
several variations on this theme, but they all seem to require the use
of the most unholy red brick that I've ever seen. This brick is a deep
red, with no variance in hue, like Lego bricks. This same brick is used
for the wall around the house, the walkway up to the front door, and the
house itself. But, in stark contrast to this deep red will be
"keystones" of white concrete at the top of each arch. Less restrained
houses will also feature white Doric columns beside the front, side,
back, and, of course, the garage doors.
Altogether, the intended effect is one of acquaintance, nay,
familiarity, with foreign culture and architecture. Not modern foreign
cultures with worthless currency, storekeepers with rotting teeth, and
students throwing bricks, of course, but rather a Star Trekesque version
of Greek culture, in which one stands around wearing spotless white
gowns while food and drink are served by hot babes with their hair up.
Tragically, this is not the effect achieved. To paraphrase *Heathers,*
it's just another example of the geeks trying to imitate the cool crowd,
and failing miserably. In essence, LakeRidge architectural styles
suggest not so much a cultural melting pot as the vomited-up contents of
one's stomach after International Night at the local continuing
education center. "Lick it up, baby, lick it up."
Compounding the problem, these hideola "homes" are invariably huge, and
invariably packed onto tiny lots of land like fat people jammed into
airplane seats. Yes, here in Texas, land of the wide open spaces, these
5000-square-foot houses are often separated by less than twenty feet
from two other 5000-square-foot houses.
Our favorite house is still under construction, but we think it's going
to be the jewel in the crown. Known affectionately to the locals as the
Taco Bell House, it's a gargantuan monstrosity of white concrete with
pink accents and pink Spanish tiles. It's a medley of LakeRidge
architectural personality disorders, featuring a fountain in the front
yard, two bell towers, and a turret. The pisser resistance is a large
porte-cochere which manages to avoid all pretense of practicality by
being unconnected to the building. It alludes less to Spanish
sophistication than to a drive-though window. Casa de Taco Bell is on a
corner lot, and one side overlooks one of the town's busier streets. On
this side is a balcony, which permits one to sing *Evita* in full view
of the folks on their way to the supermarket. Trust me, honey;
Argentina's crying for you.
Moving slightly away from the houses, we find lawns, hallucinations from
the same bad trip. Lubbock being hot and dry, and its water containing
lots of salt, growing grass in Lubbock requires a fair amount of work.
Rather than merely planting yucca and cactus, however, most LakeRidge
residents refuse to face the basic fact that they live in hell and
instead fight an unending battle against reality. They want to believe
that they live somewhere comparatively spiffy, like Dayton, Ohio, and
nice houses in nice places have nice lawns. So, most of the houses
around here feature automatic sprinklers and a crew that comes to cut
the grass, edge the grass against the sidewalk, and blow the grass
trimmings into the street.
The people who own these yards are fucking nuts.
I'd explain that these lawns are like golf courses, but that would be
inaccurate. The grass on the golf course is longer than the grass in the
yards next to it. These yards are, no kidding, putting greens. Most of
these yards are, essentially, perfectly flat rectangles of faux
AstroTurf.
However, there are some people who, not content to demonstrate their
ignorance of architectural styles, have gone on to demonstrate that they
haven't a clue what a hill looks like. Thus, they pay landscapers big
bucks for lawn implants. Some of these berms serve as boundaries, so the
owner's side will slope gradually and look rather realistic, but the
other side drops off suddenly at the property line. Being from New
England where we have hills and things that actually cross neighbors'
yards, this never fails to make me laugh.
Most of those slopes are patently not natural. There's one house that
has taken things to extremes with three berms in a row. Between the
uniformity and rapid succession of their slopes, the front lawn looks
like the Loch Ness Monster hiding under AstroTurf.
Moving further away from the houses, we cross the razor-edged lawn and
reach the mail box. Yes, the mail box. When I grew up, the mailman
walked from house to house putting the mail in the mail slot. The only
time it wasn't delivered was if you had neglected to clear a path to the
front door. That's what civilization's all about. Apparently this idea
hasn't reached Lubbock. Although this is as suburban as it gets,
apparently these folks have never heard of a mail slot.
Instead, on the sidewalk in front of each house is a squat brick and
concrete structure surrounding a conventional mailbox. These pillboxes
are made of the same bricks as their houses, and are topped with
crenelations, arches, or just a flat place where one might display cast
iron objets d'art. Ain't no fucking mailbox baseball going on in *this*
town. So you've got all of these overdone houses crammed next to one
another, as if Louis XIV had redone the houses in *Edward Scissorhands*,
but in front of them on the sidewalk you still have to have these postal
mausoleums. Yeah, you may live in UPscale LakeRidge, fancy-boy, but you
still have an ugly-ass pillbox in front of your house.
But the true nature of LakeRidge is revealed during that time of year
traditionally reserved for good will and brotherhood to all. Indeed,
cries of "oh brother" are heard throughout the streets of LakeRidge --
at least in our car. For Christmas is the time when these homeowners
break loose from their Spartan existence and go absolutely apeshit gaga.
The season begins when the LakeRidge Ladies drag out their Christmas
sweaters. Apparently, Lubbock is the dumping ground for all of those
holiday motif sweaters seen in the Lillian Vernon catalog. These are the
black vests with appliques of snowmen, candy canes, Christmas trees,
reindeer, and other icons of unbridled greed and commercialism.
The LakeRidge Ladies don't actually buy them from the Lillian Vernon
catalogue, of course. Their sweaters come from the local shops for $120
a pop and boast lots of gold lame trim. The overall effect is like
watching the Christmas episode of *Dallas* in which all of the
stiff-hair babes bounce around in shiny outfits in the hopes that their
magpie men will pick them instead of a discarded Doublemint wrapper.
(Mind you, most of the ladies on *Dallas* managed to limit themselves to
a single chin.)
So dessed, our LakeRidge matron is ready to call the lighting service.
To digress for a moment, please note that the ObChattel and I grew up in
similar towns with similar attitudes about Christmas lights. While it
wasn't uncommon to see a wreath tied to the front of a Wagoneer or a
Volvo, one didn't see a lot of Christmas lights. Being Jewish, one sure
as hell didn't see them at my house, but one didn't see them in the
neighborhood either. Large displays of Christmas lights were fine for
the bathtub Jesus set, but our neighborhoods limited themselves to the
occasional single candle in the window or a view of the tree through a
bay window. For us, ostentatious displays of lights were and are a badge
of lower socioeconomic class. If one wanted to see the sorts of
neighborhoods where the owners try to outdo each other with more lights
one had to go to skankier towns.
In Lubbock, however, one can only spend so much money on new cars, tacky
houses, and lawn care. It is therefore the accepted practice in
LakeRidge (and, if the stories are true, it is required if one lives on
the golf course), to go hog-fucking wild with the Christmas decorations.
In any event, LakeRidge is Lubbock's Christmas light mecca. The weeks
before Christmas, other residents of Lubbock slowly cruise by, gawking
at the splendor and taking pictures. Tour busses are hired to make the
rounds, and apparently the residents love it. An article about LakeRidge
lights in last December's *A-J* interviewed one resident who nattered on
about the joys of having every low-rider in town looking in her windows:
"'It used to be a fun thing for all of us girls to sit up here and
watch people drive by and wave,' she said, pointing to a staircase
located just inside the door. 'And the boys would play like
mannequins bending over the tree inside the window. People would
drive by and think we had real mannequins in the window.'"
*Real* mannequins. Hot damn.
Remember though, real mannequins don't just appear on your lawn. No,
sir. That kind of crapola takes a lot of hard work and the artistic
sense of Helen Keller. That's why our LakeRidge matron made her
reservation with the lighting service back in September when they left a
flyer tucked in her front door.
You see, stringing lights is a lot of boring, potentially dangerous
work. It's much better to hire someone else to do it. It's easy, too.
All you have to do is agree to have a small sign placed in your yard,
advertising your wealth and their service, and then select which package
you'd like them to install:
- Not as fancy as your neighbors, but at least look like you made the
effort.
- As fancy as your neighbors.
- Make your neighbors gnash their teeth in envy and lay their heads
down on the train tracks.
Since these decorating places are understaffed, they start stringing
lights in early November. In turn, the customers figure that since the
lights are there one might as well use 'em, and so the festivities begin
early. Last year the Christmas lighting season began a full ten days
before Thanksgiving.
The big thing seems to be to outline the house, so the services string
lights along the ridgepole, eaves, corners, and windows. Driving past
these houses is eerily reminiscent of Atari's (1980) Battlezone game.
Some folks don't limit themselves to the house. It is also common to
outline the border of the yard with lights. Since the yards tend to be
pretty square (as do many of the houses), this often has the rather
unfortunate effect of looking like a landing strip for aliens. Most
houses use strings of small lights, but there are some well-traveled
types who trot out the plastic luminarias they bought on that trip to
New Mexico and line the path to their front door. Ever willing to fuck
things up, however, the denizens of LakeRidge have managed to take this
to a new low. The people a few houses down from us have luminarias that
don't look even remotely like paper bags; rather, it seems that the
owners dropped all pretense and used cheap white plastic buckets with
red lights inside them. Rather than looking festive, they looked like
something out of a horror movie. "Glowing buckets of blood...."
Fundamentally, the point is to make your house as gaudy as possible in
the dark. Lights glow like costume jewelry strewn across peoples' lawns;
it's almost as though Ali-Baba's New Jersey cave had just been taken out
by a couple of cruise missiles. Not even the trees are safe: Their
branches are draped with lights of one color, and their trunks wrapped
with lights of another.
Lights, however, are just the beginning. Last year we went out to gawk,
and we saw one house with lights, and fake icicles, and, best of all,
wooden cut-out figures all over the lawn. Now, lots of people have a
Santa or two, but they had -- I couldn't make this up if I tried -- all
101 Dalmatians, from the movie, including the two parents. I'm not quite
clear what Dalmatians have to do with the birth of Jesus Christ, but
hey, I'm just a Jew.
Like the people in the *A-J* clipping above, LakeRidge people go out of
their way to encourage people not just to ogle their yards and houses,
but also to look right into their windows. Many fill their front windows
with shiny goop and lights and trees and, in general, do their best to
make their houses look like department stores. Others include "real
mannequins," animated Santas, and fake snow, all illuminated by
spotlights. Some owners, not content to encourage every B&E artist from
Muleshoe to Odessa to peer in the windows of their houses, will hold the
front door wide open, reminiscent of a *Hustler* photo spread, to allow
the masses to view the splendor within.
When we first arrived, our kindly real estate lady told us about/warned
us of this, um, charming local tradition. Of course, we promptly asked
if participation was mandatory. (She already knew we were trouble: When
she'd asked us what church we attended, I'd answered that I wasn't very
good about making it to shul.) She smiled weakly, and said, "Well, you
don't have to do it, but, you don't want to be the only dark house on
the block, now do you?"
Heaven forfend.
We spent some time kicking around various ideas. Pink flamingos pulling
Santa's sleigh? Been done elsewhere. Hanukah bushes? Nah. Candles in
windows? Nah. I had a great idea, but my proposal that we set up a
burning propane cross on the front yard was not met with smiles.
Eventually, we just said fuck it. After seeing the first few days of
lights going up, and realizing what was entailed in fitting in with the
neighbors, we bailed. Luckily, we have new neighbors next to us, and
they apparently had the same reaction. So, we were part of a small dark
spot of sanity in the midst of the hellacious glare.
--
500 B.C. -- "De gustibus non disputandum est"
1997 A.D. -- "WhatEVuh"
Steve Daniels
on Sun, 30 Aug 1998 00:08:23 -0500, hil...@door.net (Dan
Hillman) said:
>We spent some time kicking around various ideas. Pink flamingos pulling
>Santa's sleigh? Been done elsewhere. Hanukah bushes? Nah. Candles in
>windows? Nah. I had a great idea, but my proposal that we set up a
>burning propane cross on the front yard was not met with smiles.
Burn a Star of David on your neighbor's front yard.
--
He isn't a newbie. He does have catchy .sigs, too.
George Davenport 7/25/98
Ayse Sercan
>This part of LakeRidge features taste-defying combinations of columns,
>arches, shutters, tiles, 12-pane windows, and, for one nearly completed
>house, a studded wooden front door reinforced with iron straps. An
>impossibly neat pseudo-colonial is across the street from a post-modern
>California concrete bomb shelter. A Greek temple complete with columns
>and statuary of nymphs and satyrs sits next to a sort of Mediterranean
>Chateau du Drug Lord.
I wish you hadn't mentioned this.
For various reasons, I have been doing the occasional round with a real
estate agent (sorry: *Realtor (TM)*). I thought I would find some crappy
houses and some really nice places. Certainly I expected that I would
like most of the houses I went to see.
What I have found is Pure Mediocrity.
Here's a brief tangent: What fuckheadedness posesses people who are
living in a hot, dry desert with beating sun ten months out of every
twelve to build a house with passive solar designed for a northeastern
pine forest? No, it does not make any fucking sense to have huge
south-facing windows and tiny north-facing windows in Nevada. Unless you
want to turn your house into an oven at midday.
Not to mention that little bugaboo: insulation. Does anybody know what
the hell it's for? Apparently not, as half the houses I've seen don't
have *any*. One agent actually said that insulation was a bad thing in
this climate, because it kept the house hot in the summer. Whoever voted
for Prop 13 has a lot to answer for, let me tell you.
Another tangent: If you're going to build a crappy house that falls down
in twenty years, would you be so kind as to either build a real
foundation that can be rebuilt upon, or just go for the crap and make it
easy to tear down? Thanks.
>These are houses for Trump-like vulgarians, genteel souls who admire the
>refined taste and urbanity of Las Vegas. Many of these houses boast
>gigantic Palladian windows, seemingly designed to reveal the goings-on
>of the entire house ("Oooh, somebody's coming downstairs for another
>piece of chocolate cake!"), an effect more suited to the lobby of a
>midtown-Manhattan office building than the front door of a two-story
>house.
I give you: a lovely backyard. Turn to look back at the house and realize
that somebody has designed the powder room so that there is a
floor-to-ceiling window right next to the toilet (sorry: *water closet*).
The owners have recently moved out, taking the window coverings with them,
so the view is really a treat.
I can see windows in the tub enclosure. I can see windows in the
bathroom. But windows right next to the pot overlooking a back yard I
cannot understand.
>Compounding the problem, these hideola "homes" are invariably huge, and
>invariably packed onto tiny lots of land like fat people jammed into
>airplane seats. Yes, here in Texas, land of the wide open spaces, these
>5000-square-foot houses are often separated by less than twenty feet
>from two other 5000-square-foot houses.
And let us not forget that those 5000 square foot homes are laid out in
such a way that they waste more space than they use. I have seen far too
many homes with some 1000 square foot monstrosity called a "Great Room"
that lack sufficient space in the kitchen to make a loaf of bread.
I have been in a 4000 square foot house that housed five adults, had a
large kitchen, real dining room, a library/music room, and five workshops.
Not in California, but I have been in one. In California, it seems that
4000 square feet is just enough space to squeeze in a great room, family
room, galley kitchen, something called a "master suite" which seems to
consist largely of vast expanses of white carpet, and two miniscule
bedrooms that could not house an adult.
God forbid space should be functional and carefully laid out with some
thought to how people will use it. No, let's put a bedroom next to the
family room, and have another one over the garage. Let's have the toilet
against a wall in the dining room, too. Let's make it so you have to haul
your laundry halfway across the house through the center of four rooms.
Whoever these architects may be, they should enjoy their time spent in
the special "activity zone" of Hell designed just for their needs.
>Our favorite house is still under construction, but we think it's going
>to be the jewel in the crown. Known affectionately to the locals as the
>Taco Bell House, it's a gargantuan monstrosity of white concrete with
>pink accents and pink Spanish tiles. It's a medley of LakeRidge
>architectural personality disorders, featuring a fountain in the front
>yard, two bell towers, and a turret. The pisser resistance is a large
>porte-cochere which manages to avoid all pretense of practicality by
>being unconnected to the building. It alludes less to Spanish
>sophistication than to a drive-though window. Casa de Taco Bell is on a
>corner lot, and one side overlooks one of the town's busier streets. On
>this side is a balcony, which permits one to sing *Evita* in full view
>of the folks on their way to the supermarket. Trust me, honey;
>Argentina's crying for you.
My favourite pseudo-Spanish "detail" is the balcony-that-is-not-a-balcony.
The little piece of metal attached to the front of the house that, if you
put a plant on it, much less stepped out onto it, would fall off like a
sugar ornament.
Odder still is when these are attached to first-floor windows. I have an
image in my mind of a distraught Juliet standing at her balcony doorway
(not daring to step out lest she end up inelegantly strewn across the
patio), with Romeo crouching down in the ice plant a few inches from her
feet.
>Moving further away from the houses, we cross the razor-edged lawn and
>reach the mail box. Yes, the mail box. When I grew up, the mailman
>walked from house to house putting the mail in the mail slot. The only
>time it wasn't delivered was if you had neglected to clear a path to the
>front door. That's what civilization's all about. Apparently this idea
>hasn't reached Lubbock. Although this is as suburban as it gets,
>apparently these folks have never heard of a mail slot.
But... but a mail slot would mean the postman would have to *walk*
through the neighborhood. God forbid.
Here in California, we have entire cities constructed without sidewalks.
And if you walk across that strip of people's lawns near the street, they
come out and *yell* at you to stay off their lawn. After all, only a
vagrant would want to go for a walk.
--
ay...@netcom.com
"Ayse has called innocent children 'mad hippies' to their faces."
-- neiliili <nbe...@hotmail.com>
Ted Samsel
: I have reviewed the surveillance tapes, and have discovered that
: >We spent some time kicking around various ideas. Pink flamingos pulling
: >Santa's sleigh? Been done elsewhere. Hanukah bushes? Nah. Candles in
: >windows? Nah. I had a great idea, but my proposal that we set up a
: >burning propane cross on the front yard was not met with smiles.
: Burn a Star of David on your neighbor's front yard.
I don't mind tacky Xmas lights, but here in Richmond, VA, there is
what is known as the Christmas Whitebread Treatment which is one
'lectric candle in each window in the faux and unfaux colonial
style housing. Very dull and stodgy. Hey, this is actually a
pagan holiday (Saturnalia) that the christers stole for their
own uses. Why not gaudy lights? And if you have blue lights, you
are probably African-American....
Re: Hannukah. Howzabout a natural gas menorah?
--
Ted Samsel....tejas@infi.net (or tbsa...@richmond.infi.net)
"do the boogie woogie in the South American way"
Rhumba Boogie- Hank Snow (1955)
Andrew Frederiksen
Ted Samsel <te...@sl001.infi.net> wrote:
[Snipped: In The Land of Conan The Vulgarian]
>Re: Hannukah. Howzabout a natural gas menorah?
Every December, in the fine city of Montreal, the one and only
Hannukahmobile appears on city streets. Picture an enormous
American station wagon (the variety killed off by the minivan)
upon which is perched a three-foot-high electrical construction
vaguely ressembling a menorah, and sporting light bulbs of
impressive wattage. It is, of course, lit for the appropriate
night, and draped with many festive banners of the "Happy
Hannukah" variety.
Now, any Jewish readers of this forum need not be told that
this apparent effort to prove that Jews can be as tacky as
Christians is sponsored, of course, by the local Lubavitch.
For the rest of you, the Lubavitch are to Judaism as the
Jehovah's Witnesses are to Christianity. The basic
philosophical difference is this: the mainstream believes that
the Messiah is coming -- eventually; the Lubavitch believe
that the Messiah is coming -- next week. Ultimately a
harmless bunch, and just dandy for annoying the local fundies.
--
-- Andrew Frederiksen, fred...@unixg.ubc.ca aka an...@geop.ubc.ca
-- http://www.geop.ubc.ca/~andyf