The Yellowed Rose of Texas

What's with the city of Austin, Texas? An irate local taxpayer did a suicide flight in his small airplane straight into the city's I.R.S. building. Austin's large lake suffered such a drop in water level, two abandoned, dumped vehicles linked with past, unsolved murders became visible in it. The city and its metro area have been favorite locales for the filming of vicious slasher movies. Texas' governor's mansion, situated in Austin, was almost totally burned by an arsonist without the state trooper-guards noticing anything was wrong. The governor there has called for Texas to secede from the union of the U.S. states. The Longhorns football players of the University of Texas in the middle of the city are driven by fancy air-conditioned buses, instead of walking, only two blocks from their hyperexpensive locker rooms to their practice area. Austinites are such dog lovers, they are ready to equate the mistreatment of dogs with the murder of cops or the kidnapping of children.

Cigar-chomping, pot-smoking, irascible, Willie Nelson-type country singer Kinky Friedman of Austin continuously runs for governor or some other state office, and is given serious attention. The city council of Austin honored a couple of homeless, mentally challenged persons, who recently died, after they for years interrupted council meetings with their strange speeches, and were tolerated in doing so. Hundreds of thousands of bats annually fly into the city to inhabit caves at its downtown bridges to the delight of the locals. The downtown museum dedicated to the famous author, O. Henry, who briefly lived in Austin in a small house which is now the museum, is almost totally unknown to the public. The state legislature in Austin came very close to legally allowing students at the giant U. of Texas campus to keep private firearms in their dorms, and even to carry the weapons into the classrooms. The official slogan of the city is "Keep Austin Weird."

I can tell you that Austin is one strange, ominous city which I'm certainly going to avoid at all cost, and I urge you to do the same. Try Omaha.